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THOUGHTS IN MY GARDEN 



EY 



MARY G. WARE. 

M 

AUTHOR OF "ELEMENTS OP CHARACTER. 



w The human mind is as ground j which is such as it is made by cultivation." 

SWEDENBORO. 






BOSTON: 
CROSBY AND NICHOLS, 



WM. CARTER & BROTHER. 
18 63. 



^ 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1862, 

By Maey G. Ware, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



boston: 

CHAS. H. CROSBY, PRINTER, 5 & 7 WATER STREET. 



V 




^ 




^ 






I, 




II, 
III 




IV, 




V, 



CONTENTS. 



THE DAWNING DAY. 
FAITH WORK AND LOVE WORK. 
ELM SEEDS. 
WEEDS. 
SQUIRRELS. 
VI. BIRDS AND OTHER THINGS. 
VII. THE SOWING OF SEED. 
VIII. ABOUT SEEDS. 
IX. THE CHANGING SEASONS. 

X. AUTUMN LEAVES. 
XI. THE USES OF GARDENING. 
XII. THE HOUSEHOLD GARDEN. 

XIII. HOME VIRTUES. 

XIV. PARENTAL DUTY. 
XV. SIMPLE PLEASURES. 

XVI. FILIAL AND PARENTAL LOVE. 
XVII . DISAPPOINTMENTS . 
XVIII. DROUGHT. 

XIX. INSECTS AND WORMS. 
XX. THE POWER AND USE OF CIRCUMSTANCE. 



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 



" What surmounts the reach 
Of human sense I shall delineate so, 
By likening spiritual to corporal forms, 
As may express them best; though what if earth 
Be but the shadow of heaven ; and things therein 
Each to other like, more than on earth is thought ? " 

Milton. 



QAS) 




INTBODUCTORY ESSAY. 

^^IpHOSE among the readers of this little 
l^Jjgl volume who are not familiar with the 
doctrines of the New Church, as taught by 
Swedenborg, may look upon the explanations 
contained in it of the correspondence of things 
natural with things spiritual, as fanciful or poeti- 
cal merely, instead of being what the writer in- 
tended, strictly scientific. To such, a more sys- 
tematic statement of the subject may be interesting 
and useful. 

There has always been a class of minds not 
willing, or not able, to rest patiently in the ex- 
ternal knowledge of the material world, but seek- 
ing earnestly to find some meaning hidden within, 
some anima rmmdil informing with wisdom the 
dead matter of which earth is made, and the living 
organisms, vegetable and animal, that cover its 
surface. So, too, ever since the promulgation 



V1U INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 

of the Scriptures, a similar class of minds has 
been seeking there for a sense within the letter, 
a hidden wisdom, that shall give to the seemingly 
strange symbolism of the Word a meaning and a 
power that it must ever lack to the reader who 
is destitute of such knowledge. 

Various theories aiming to explain the spiritual 
system of the universe and of the Scriptures, 
have been given to the world; but none that 
has been widely received. It is evident that no 
human mind can be competent to explain the 
wisdom and the love of the Divine Mind, as a 
whole, though it may attain to many detached and 
fragmentary truths. Divine illumination must be 
needful, in order that the human intellect should 
have breadth and depth to measure and to fathom 
divinity. Swedenborg claims to have received 
such illumination, for the purpose of teaching 
mankind the internal meaning of the Word and 
Works of God. Strong internal evidence that he 
did so, lies in the fact that his exposition of the 
doctrine of correspondence is a positive science, 
reducing the Word and Works to perfect con- 
sistency in themselves, and perfect harmony with 
each other. In the light of his teachings, the 
supposed contradictions of science and religion 



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. IX 

disappear, and each helps to Illustrate the other ; 
while both are plainly seen to be the veritable 
outpouring of the mind of the Heavenly Father, 
for the instruction unto salvation of His children. 

This illumination, of which Swedenborg claims 
the possession, is something quite unlike the in- 
spiration of those through whom the letter of the 
Scriptures was given. Being the veritable Word 
of God, the Scriptures did not require anything 
beyond a material means of expression. Those 
who wrote them were breathed into from on high, 
and wrote what they thus received without neces- 
sarily knowing the meaning of that to which they 
thus gave material form. Illumination is an en- 
lightening of the mind, so that it becomes capable 
of comprehending truths otherwise too high for it, 
and then of teaching them voluntarily to others. 
Inspiration places the mind in an involuntary 
state, and excludes the possibility of mistake in 
its subject. Illumination leaves the will free, so 
that its subject is still fallible, and his teachings 
not to be reverenced in the same way or degree as 
those of inspiration. 

Few can doubt that every word and work of 
the Divine Being must have a meaning and a 
purpose. We can all perceive that the wiser 



X INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 

and better a man becomes, the less frequently 
he acts without end and aim. There is a con- 
stantly increasing recognition in his mind that 
there should be thought and purpose in all his 
sayings and doings ; and if this be true even of 
regenerating man, how much more completely 
true it must be of the All-perfect Creator. 

The Works of God must each represent some 
Divine thought or affection, and the universe 
taken together must represent the Divine Mind. 
The same is true of the Word of God. There- 
fore the types and symbols of Scripture speak a 
language in perfect unison with the creations of 
the outer world. 

There are as many ways of reading the Word 
and Works of God as there are individuals who 
read; for they both, to a certain extent, mirror 
the mind of the reader. We can only perceive 
accurately, and appreciate justly, whatever is pre- 
sented to our observation, when there is something 
in our own minds corresponding to it. 

One class of minds is affected chiefly by the 
denunciatory parts of the Word of God, and an- 
other class, on a similar plane, is reminded of God 
in His Works only when He sweeps over the earth 
in storms and tempests. To such He is only a 



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. XI 

God of terrors. They may admire and tremble 
before His power, but they are not warmed and 
quickened by His love. 

Others are most interested in the Command- 
ments of God, and seek to find them out that they 
may do them. Simple obedience is the law and 
the delight of their lives. A parallel class of 
minds is constantly perceiving in nature the adap- 
tation of its products to the wants of man ; and 
to render them more serviceable to him in all 
manner of practical ways, is the direction in which 
all their efforts tend. 

Others again love especially to learn the doc- 
trines of Scripture, and to form schemes and 
systems of God's laws in His relations with man ; 
to find how man is to be converted, regenerated, 
and saved ; and this to the exclusion of any prac- 
tical application of what they thus learn to their 
own lives. Nearly related to these are they who 
devote themselves to the examination of the physi- 
cal laws of the universe, simply as abstract studies, 
and without having their minds strengthened and 
enriched by any practical application of what they 
learn ; who study for the amusement and satisfac- 
tion of the intellect only, without regard to use. 

With others faith, worship and obedience go hand 



Xll INTRODUCTORY ESSAY, 

in hand. They reverently obey, and through obe- 
dience learn to know the doctrines of the Lord. 
They seek to know that they may "do and 
teach ;" and, through their good words and works, 
men learn to honor their Father who is in heaven. 
Akin to, these are they who seek to find in nature 
some articulate teaching of the Lord; who are 
not satisfied with contemplating it as a dead world, 
but who hope to find within it a living soul, dis- 
coursing of its Almighty Maker. To such the 
science of correspondences is an inestimable boon ; 
the joy of their lives. They can never tire of 
reading the Word or of studying the Works of 
God, for each day and hour is opening out to 
them new phases of the Divine Wisdom and Love. 
Love, Wisdom and Power form the three phases 
of Divinity; and affection, thought and life the 
three phases of humanity. Divine Love and Wis- 
dom are the sources of God's Word and Works. 
Power is the means by which Love and Wisdom 
express themselves. Human affection and thought 
are the sources of all that man says and does ; and 
his life is the embodiment of these two. Every- 
thing of which we take cognizance in the creation 
addresses itself either to our thoughts or our affec- 
tions, because it conies to us from the Divine 



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. XU1 

Wisdom or Love. It is a form or expression 
of either truth or goodness. Thus all things come 
into one or the other of two great classes, which 
correspond to one or the other of these two uni- 
versal attributes of the Heavenly Father. Innu- 
merable as are the forms of creation, they still all 
come under one or the other class ; all come from 
the Divine Love or Wisdom, all correspond to 
some form of goodness or truth, all address them- 
selves either to the affections or the thoughts of 
man. 

It must not be supposed that by correspondence 
is meant resemblance in the way we mean when 
we say one person or thing looks like another 
person or thing. Perhaps no better illustration 
can be given of what is meant than the human 
countenance, which, in its ever- varying expressions, 
corresponds to the emotions of the soul. As the 
human features offer to the eye something which 
expresses the varying passions of the mind within, 
so the universe of matter expresses or corresponds 
to all that is in the soul of man, and the universe 
of spirit all that is in the soul of angels. As men 
and angels are formed in the imao-e and likeness 
of God, these two universes correspond also to 
Him, and so aid men and angels to come nearer 



XIV INTKODUCTOKY ESSAY. 

to Him through the instruction they gain from 
these correspondences. The universe thus forms 
the Grand Man, which is the basis of the whole 
system of correspondences. 

First there is God, the Infinite, Divine Man. 
Then there is the finite, angelic man, formed in 
His image, with a spiritual world about him cor- 
responding to his being, adapted to his wants, and 
capable of educating his faculties to the utmost. 
Then there is man in his lowest state, still in the 
likeness of God, but clad in a material form, and 
dwelling in a material world ; corresponding to 
his being, adapted to his wants, and capable of 
opening his faculties, and preparing them for that 
higher training which awaits him, when, putting 
off his material frame, he enters upon the spiritual 
world, with the nicer senses, the wiser thoughts, 
the purer affections that pertain to the angel. 

Thus from the Divine Humanity downward 
through angels and men, and all the things that 
surround them, all tend to the human form, all 
join to make up the Grand Man, or macrocosm, 
of the universe. Everywhere and always men 
and angels are surrounded by types, the whole 
value and purpose of which is to help them to the 
comprehension of themselves and of their Creator ; 



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. XV 

to teach them spiritual truth, by means of which 
they may be constantly ascending to a higher 
degree of spiritual life. 

The human soul, clad in a material body and 
placed in a material world, finds its true life only 
when it learns to perceive that the material is the 
result of the spiritual, and that it exists only 
through its correspondence with the spiritual. 
The material world does nothing but mislead 
us, until w T e know and feel that it is entirely 
secondary to the spiritual world. Then it be- 
comes a ladder on which we may mount up to 
the highest wisdom of which man is capable. 

The science of correspondences is the one ab- 
solute and universal science, for it includes all 
natural and physical science, all art and literature, 
all philosophy and theology, all thought and feel- 
ing. 

The old theology taught that the higher we 
ascended in the spiritual world the less complex 
everything became. It asserted that God was a 
simple entity, without parts or affections ; that 
angels were intangible creatures, without organ- 
ized forms ; that heaven was an insubstantial, 
cloudy place, in which these beings floated, sing- 
ing eternal anthems of praise to the glory of the 



XVI INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 

Almighty. Yet this life and these beings were 
asserted to be perfect and happy beyond anything 
that man could conceive. 

Everything that we see on earth reverses all 
this ; for here we find that the capacity for knowl- 
edge and for happiness increases in direct propor- 
tion with the complexity of organization of the 
being. From the soft, scarcely organized mass 
of the mollusk, through fish, reptile, bird and 
beast, up to the firm, delicate, and exquisitely 
complex organization of man, the capacity for use, 
for culture, and for enjoyment, rises proportion- 
ately higher and higher. Is it not then irrational 
to believe that when we pass from man to angel 
we become less highly organized, less perfect in 
form, less sensitive in perception? We believe 
that a true analogy indicates what the New 
Church teaches ; that the angel retains all that 
made the man capable of using his material form. 
That the spiritual body permeates every fibre and 
atom of the material body ; and that when the 
material body falls off, the spiritual body remains 
in a similar form, but more perfect in every sense, 
capacity and power ; thus becoming a fit instru- 
ment for the use of the soul in the higher world 
on which it is entering. 



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. XV11 

The spiritual world is the soul of the natural 
world,, as the spiritual body is the soul of the 
natural body. The natural body and the natural 
world exist only because the spiritual body and 
the spiritual world are within them ; and they die 
and deCay so soon as the spiritual is withdrawn 
from them. 

A man with only the sense of touch would grope 
about the world perceiving only the objects he can 
reach by actual contact with his body, and per- 
ceiving them in a very imperfect way. If the 
other senses could be opened to him one after 
another, the added perceptions of each would seem 
like the entering into a new world, so much would 
be offered to his observation with each new 
power of perception. The worlds of smell and 
taste, of sight and sound, would each seem like a 
new revelation ; and yet they were all about him 
just as perfectly before he had the use of his 
senses as after. Just in the same way the world 
of spirit is all around us while we live in the world 
of matter ; but our senses are not yet opened to 
perceive it. The death of the body is the opening 
of the spiritual senses, by which we shall be made 
capable of perceiving the glories and perfections 
of the spiritual world. Just in proportion as that 

2 



XV111 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 

world is more perfect than this, must its objects of 
sense be more complex, varied and numerous ; 
and our perceptions more delicate, our capacity of 
enjoyment more exquisite. That our moral nature 
may find scope for the employment of its faculties, 
there must be the most varied social relations in 
which all charity will become mutual ; each angel 
having something to give his neighbor, and some 
want which his neighbor may supply. As in the 
human body each part is dependent on every 
other part, while it has its own special function in 
relation to the whole, so in the Grand Man of the 
spiritual world each individual is made happy by 
fulfilling the duties of his own sphere, and receiv- 
ing in turn the benefits that belong to him. No 
one there desires to leave his own place, to escape 
from his own duties, or to receive what does not 
belong to him; yet the places, the duties and the 
gifts are more varied and more numerous than we 
can conceive. As we cannot imagine one sense or 
organ of the human body envious or jealous of an- 
other, because no one sense or organ can do the 
duty of another so agreeably to itself as it can do 
its own, so in heaven as happiness consists, for 
the most part, in the doing of duty, each angel 
wishes to do what he is best fitted for doing well, 



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. XIX 

and each is placed where his own special duty is to 
be done. 

What the duties of the spiritual world are we 
are not told. They are not the same as those of 
earth, but they correspond in the benefits which 
they confer upon the spiritual body to those of 
earth in what they do for the natural body. As 
the spiritual body is immeasurably more varied in 
its capacities and in its wants than the natural 
body, so the employments of the spiritual world 
will be more varied than those of earth. 

Rising above the heavenly hosts to the contem- 
plation of the Deity who created and who sustains 
the universe, holding all things from the highest 
to the lowest, from the greatest to the most 
minute, in the embrace of His Almighty power, is 
it rational to believe that this being of infinities is 
a simple entity, without parts or affections, an ab- 
stract ' ' somewhat " without form or personality? 
This is what the Old Church has taught, but what 
the New Church denies. We believe that the 
Deity is a being of infinite parts and affections, 
and that in His personality is contained the causa- 
tive soul of every created thing ; that in Him is 
something corresponding to everything that exists 



XX INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 

out of Him, and that nothing ever did or ever can 
exist apart from this correspondence. 

This correspondence is of two kinds ; that of sim- 
ilarity and that of opposition. The first of these is 
directly of the Heavenly Father ; the second is in- 
directly of Him, because all power to will and to 
do is His ; but directly of the perversity of evil 
men and evil spirits. The first is of God's Provi- 
dence, the second is of His permission. 

All other creatures that God has made are with- 
out freedom. Their knowledge is instinctive ; and 
each one follows the bent of his own natural in- 
clinations, without having any idea of right or 
wrong, of moral good or evil ; and therefore with- 
out having any responsibility. Man differs from 
all other creatures in being almost without instinct, 
and in being possessed of a freedom of thought 
and will that makes him capable of accepting or 
of rejecting whatever of good or evil is placed be- 
fore him ; hence responsibility is one of his most 
marked and distinguishing characteristics. If he 
love the Lord and endeavor to keep His Command- 
ments, true thoughts and good affections will fill 
his mind, and he will constantly grow to corres- 
pond more and more directly to his Heavenly 
Father. If he love himself and the world he will 



INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. XXI 

turn away from keeping the Commandments, and 
will grow constantly more in opposition to his 
Heavenly Father. The same faculty of loving 
which in the one is developed into a good affection, 
becomes in the other an evil passion. The same 
faculty of thinking which in the one is developed 
into forms of truth, in the other expands only into 
falsehood. The one is fostered by the Divine 
Providence because it is in harmony with the 
Divine Love and Wisdom; the other is per- 
mitted only that man may be left in perfect 
freedom. 

The material world which surrounds us is de- 
signed to teach us what is within us ; therefore we 
find in it all manner of good and evil things in 
animal, vegetable and mineral forms. All good 
and useful forms derive their existence directly 
from the Lord. All evil and noxious forms derive 
their existence directly from man, and indirectly 
from the Lord. The former are the outbirth and 
expression of the Divine Love and Wisdom. The 
latter are the result and expression of the evil 
and falsehood that is in man. The former by 
their beauty and usefulness are designed by the 
Providence of God to lead us in the path of 



XX11 INTRODUCTORY ESSAY. 

life. The latter by their ugliness and noxious- 
ness are permitted by the same Providence, 
that man may be repelled from the way of 
death. 




THE DAWNING DAY. 



— *««<>#»»*- 



"The first watch of the morning is internal, pacific, and sweet, 
above the succeeding watches of the day." — S wedenborg. 



s^22£ 




I. 



THE DAWNING DAY. 



FIND great pleasure, as well as instruc- 
^f||tion, in working in a garden. All the 
processes of gardening are full of suggestion to 
every mind that loves to think. The Lord is 
ever preaching to us in all His Providences ; but 
in none of them more plainly than in the growth 
and development of the vegetable kingdom. 

My garden is an open, sunny spot, lying in the 
midst of beautiful scenery. In front it is bounded 
by the village street ; one of the prettiest that can 
anywhere be found ; bordered on each side with 
luxuriant maple and ash trees, forming a long and 
beautiful avenue, such as would make a fitting 
approach to the finest house in the land; but 
which, to my mind, is all the more beautiful for 
belonging to everybody in the village, instead of 
being the property of a single individual. On the 
(25) 



26 THE DAWNING DAY, 

opposite side of the way there stands a superb 
grove of stately old elms, planted a century and 
a half ago, to adorn the site of the parsonage, 
which was built when the town was settled for the 
second time, after having been totally destroyed 
during King Philip's war. South of the garden, 
separated from it by a small lawn, stands our old, 
rambling house, whose age is more than a hun- 
dred years, canopied by two immense elms, whose 
youth no man remembers. On the west is a 
deep, winding dell, shaded with a variety of fine 
trees, and ending in a broad meadow, across 
which, through the vista formed by the dell, the 
eye wanders away northward, among groves of 
walnuts and elms, and then to a village with its 
heaven-pointing steeples, and distant, wooded hills 
beyond. 

In the warm summer mornings, I love to stand 
in the midst of my garden and see the sun rise, 
bathing the landscape with a refulgence of beauty 
such as no other hour of his course ever bestows. 
What the rosebud is to the rose, the early morn- 
ing is to the rest of the day. There is a freshness 
and purity in the aspect of the landscape then that 
resembles nothing else so much as an opening 
bud of the queen of flowers. There is a brilliant, 



THE DAWXING DAY. 27 

crystalline clearness in the atmosphere, too, that 
gives a distinctness to the outlines of even distant 
objects, which is never produced by the glaring 
light of noon, nor the hazy gleam of the evening 
twilight. It is Nature's most genial hour, when 
her face glows with warmest welcome to her 
lovers, unobscured by any of those veils of earthy 
miasm that are sure to dim the lustre of her 
beauty at a later hour. 

I think I am right in believing that there is a 
correspondence between this peculiar beauty of the 
early morning and the commencement of the re- 
generate life. When the soul is first roused from 
its stupor of worldliness and self-love, a door seems 
suddenly to have opened through which we look 
into the fair light of that city which has no need 
of the sun, and we feel as if we should never 
turn away from it to follow after the dim, earth- 
ly flame that has hitherto lighted our path- 
way. A vision of celestial beauty beckons us 
to go with it into the New Jerusalem, and we 
think we shall never tire, while our day of life 
lasts, of strewing palm branches along the way 
and singing psalms of joy and praise. This 
period is of but short duration. The rising of 
the natural sun soon causes the vapors of the 



28 THE DAWNING DAY. 

earth to ascend, and dim the transparency of the 
atmosphere, even in the fairest days ; and so, in 
like manner, the spiritual sun shines in upon our 
souls, and as it rises higher and higher, reveals 
to us more and more of the noxious evils that 
permeate every fibre of our being. The warmer 
the sun .shines the more quickly the vapors rise, 
and the more distinctly the evils of our nature 
become revealed to us. It may be that, as the 
day advances, we shall forget our vision of the 
morning, and, blinded by the mists that wrap us 
round, succumb to evil, until we lose our faith, so 
that our noon shall be shrouded in darkness, and 
our sun go clown in the blackness of despair. Such 
cannot be the result of a genuine conversion. If 
the light and warmth of the early dawn awoke a 
sincerely answering love in the soul, the memory 
of that first vision of the heavenly life will go with 
us through every moment of the day, kindling a 
faith that shall give us light though thick clouds 
overshadow our path ; giving us a rejoicing hope 
for brighter hours in store for us ; and finally, 
burning with the steady flame of charity, shall 
keep the heart warm and the head clear in every 
trial and emergency life can bring. 

The morning dawn is eloquent with life and 



THE DAW1STNG DAY. 29 

hope, and the promise of power to meet the toil 
that is to come. The evening twilight is surges- 
tive of peaceful repose from the toil that is past. 
If the day of our life has been one of faithful 
effort, after the regeneration it will end in a twi- 
light that shall say to the soul, "Depart in peace ; 
for the morning that waits for thee shall know no 
diminution of its glories ; but shall shine more and 
more brightly and clearly and peacefully through- 
out a perfect, eternal day." 




FAITH WORK AND LOVE WORK. 



— ***®<>®-»»»~ 



"He who has love in his heart has spurs in his side." 

Proverb. 



-*$/&* 




n. 



FAITH WORK AND LOVE WORK, 



©IS STINT myself to work an hour at weeding 
sHJH in my garden every morning before breakfast ; 
but it often requires a good deal of effort to turn 
my eyes away from the beautiful landscape that 
surrounds me, and fix them upon the weeds at my 
feet ; just as it is often very hard, and sometimes, 
to our wilful hearts, seems degrading, to turn 
from the study and contemplation of the sub- 
limities of truth, and employ ourselves about the 
many little duties that go to make up the comfort 
of external life. As the success of the garden 
must depend on the care with which the weeds 
are removed, and the tender growth of the young 
plants watched over, so the comfort of the family 
depends on the performance of a thousand petty 
duties that go to make up the great sum of 
housekeeping. 

3 (33) 



34 FAITH WORK AND LOVE WORK. 

A garden may be successful, and a house may- 
be well kept ; and yet the garden may be devoid 
of beauty, and the house may be an unhappy 
home. There is Mary's way and Martha's way 
of doing everything, Mary works from love, and 
Martha works from faith. Mary's heart works, 
and Martha's head works. Martha knows it is 
wrong to be idle ; that in the sweat of the brow 
we are condemned to earn our bread ; and she 
thinks that man was made for work. Mary, too, 
knows, when she stops to think about it, that it 
is wrong to be idle ; but then she feels that it is 
pleasant to work ; that the sweat of the brow 
brings no pain to those who work with love ; that 
the body is more vigorous and the mind more 
elastic with those who work than with those who 
are idle ; and she feels that work was made for 
man. With Martha work is an oppressive bond- 
age, while with Mary it is an inspiring freedom. 

The saying of the Lord to the Jews, who were 
enslaved by their ceremonial observances of the 
Sabbath, may be applied with equal propriety to 
many of our surroundings. Men and women are 
not made for the house, the garden, the farm, the 
profession ; but all these are made for men and 
women. So long as we believe ourselves made 



FAITH WORK AND LOYE WORK. 35 

for duties we work like slaves ; but when we wake 
to the truth that duties were made for us, we 
come into the liberty wherewith the Lord makes 
his children free. The soul grows in stature, and 
beauty, and grace,, by the doing of duty ; just as 
the body grows in health, and strength, and skill, 
by the exercise of its members. 

The Marthas who seek the Lord sorrowing, 
through wearisome and painful effort at doing 
their duty as a hard task set before them, might 
add warmth to their light, which is what they are 
suffering for, if they would give more thought to 
the exceeding love of God in making this world so 
beautiful. As I look around me, standing here in 
the midst of my garden, it is evident to my mind 
that God loves to work ; that creation is a delight 
to Him ; and this is why He has made so vast 
a variety of beautiful objects purely for the de- 
light of the soul, and subserving no use to the 
body. 

I have seen more than one human being who 
dared to walk through a flower-garden, with a 
sneer upon the lip, and ask what use there was in 
all this ; and it seemed to me that it was a profane 
question, that could never have emanated from a 
reverent heart. 



36 FAITH WORK AND LOVE WORK. 

It is very strange, and shows to what a low 
state man has sunk, that he calls only those 
things useful that subserve the life of the body ; 
while those which feed and clothe the soul are 
called beautiful, but useless. Can a race of beings 
truly believe that they have souls and yet make 
such a distinction ? 

I am not one of those who think lightly of the 
body, or who overlook its wants ; for I am well 
assured that every function of the body which 
works imperfectly is a fetter upon the movements 
of the soul ; and therefore that we cannot be care- 
less of the wants of the body without sinning 
against the soul. My garden is by no means a 
mere flower-garden. My endeavor is that it shall 
contain sufficient variety of fruits and vegetables, 
so that it may bring its tribute of comfort or 
luxury to the table every day in the year ; but 
I think a garden that does not acknowledge the 
existence of a soul that loves the beautiful, by 
affording flowers as well as fruits, proves its 
owner deficient in the higher attributes of hu- 
manity. When it is evident that God loves 
flowers so much, since He adorns the earth with 
them so profusely, it is as evident that if we do 



FAITH WORK AXD LOVE WORK. 37 

not love them we are so far not images and like- 
nesses of the Creator. 

Where we can count the varieties of plants that 
are directly useful to the body by tens, we must 
count those that are not so by thousands. If 
these latter are of no use, we ask, like the un- 
believing disciple, "To what purpose is all this 
waste?" Here is material enough to make more 
wheat, and potatoes, and rice, than would supply 
the wants of the whole human race, wasted in 
useless beauty ; while thousands of men and wo- 
men suffer for lack of food. It seems to me to 
prove that God sets very little store by the body 
compared with the soul, when he feeds the latter 
so much more richly than the former. 

Every creation from the hand of God must be 
the expression of a Divine thought or feeling ;. 
and if we study them reverently, and enjoy their 
beauty with thankful hearts, our filial love for our 
Heavenly Father must grow day by day, as we 
learn more and more of the beauties and wonders 
of His works. New plants are discovered every 
year, by those who explore new countries, and 
added to our gardens, to give us new varieties of 
food, or to delight our sight and smell by their 
beautiful forms and colors, or their delicious 



38 FAITH WOUK AND LOVE WORK. 

odors; and men say, "How strange that these 
plants should have grown for ages, wasting their 
flowers and fruits to no purpose ! " But does not 
this wealth of creation teach us that God loves to 
work ; and that creation is the spontaneous out- 
flowing of the Divine Life ? 

To Him in whose Infinite Thought a thousand 
years are as one day, it must be but a small 
matter that the flower blooms and fades, and the 
fruit is perfected and decays, through a length of 
time that to our finite thought seems immense. 
He built the earth, and furnished it for man's 
dwelling-place, and His love for man is such, that 
it overflowed in the infinite variety of beautiful 
forms that surround us ; and this creative love did 
not wait until man should be ready to take pos- 
session of each earthlv mansion, but delighted 
itself in preparing beforehand abodes for children 
yet to come. 

The slave who works from compulsion, and the 
drudge who works merely for his hire, stop with 
doing the least possible amount of work that they 
can ; but he who works from love, though it be 
from a low and natural form of love, does a great 
deal more than is required of him ; while he whose 
love is elevated and spiritual, works in true Chris- 



FAITH WORK AKD LOVE WORK. 39 

tlan liberty, seeking not his own, and loving his 
neighbor as himself; never inquiring what he must 
do, but striving to do all that he can. 

Since human love works thus aboundingly, we 
can hardly be surprised to find the Divine Love, 
in whose image ours is formed, and from whose 
life ours derives its power, providing not merely 
for the support of life, but for its enjoyment, 
through every perception of both the spiritual and 
the natural body. 




ELM SEEDS. 



— *«#<>#»»- 



The seeming waste of nature is in fact a storing up of resources 
for future need ; not a spendthrift loss of power. 



<^22Z? 




m. 



ELM SEEDS, 



liC*^ ® l ar g e a number of elms stand near by my 
^)^|5 garden that when the seeds ripen, let the 
wind blow from what quarter it may, it is sure to 
waft them within its limits, until its whole surface 
is thickly sown. They soon vegetate upon the 
loose earth, and after a few days it is difficult to 
find a square inch of soil that is not shaded by an 
infant tree. What a preparation is here for a 
forest ! and yet all must be raked away and des- 
troyed, that the growth of the garden plants may 
not be impeded. Of the seeds that fall in the 
neighboring fields and pastures, and by the road- 
side, where no one will notice them enough to 
destroy them, not one in a million will ever be- 
come a full grown tree. The very few that 
survive the accidents that will destroy most of 
them while young, will continue to make all the 
(43) 



44 ELM SEEDS. 

region round about magnificent with their beauty 
for centuries to come, as their parents are now 
doing ; but it seems strange that so much seed 
should be wasted, when so small a quantity would 
suffice to produce all the trees that will ever come 
to maturity. Probably a single large tree pro- 
duces in one year as many seeds as there will 
be elms in the whole town for a million years. 
Can this be the mere waste of the abounding 
wealth of the Divine Creative Power ? or is there 
a meaning in it for our soul's instruction, and a 
material use for the benefit of our bodies? A 
little study and reflection will teach us that there 
is food both for soul and body preparing in this, 
as in every other, creation of the material world. 
Vegetable growth and decay seem to have been 
the means whereby the Creator has produced fer- 
tility over the whole earth. A little moisture on 
the barren surface of a rock causes it to become 
clothed with lichens : one of the lower forms of 
vegetable growth. After a while these decay and 
leave particles of soil upon the rock sufficient to 
sustain the life of mosses, and these, passing away 
in their turn, leave a little deeper coat of decayed 
vegetable substance which suffices to support some 
small, flower-bearing plant. Years roll on in this 



ELM SEEDS. 45 

way, until enough soil has been eliminated by suc- 
cessive plants, acting upon the decaying rock, and 
decaying in their turn, for a stately tree to find 
abundant nourishment where once there was 
nothing but hard, bare stone. This process goes 
on slowly in our climate, — too slowly for a great 
result to be observed by any one man ; but in 
tropical climates a very few years suffice to change 
barrenness into fertility, whenever water, moisten- 
ing mineral substances, causes. the minute seeds 
floating in the atmosphere to cling to them ; and 
they are afterward stimulated into growth by 
heat and light. Desert sands, reefs of coral, fields 
of lava, are transformed by these agents into fer- 
tile fields and stately forests. Geologists are led 
to believe, by their investigations of the earth's 
strata, that all vegetative soil was produced in this 
way, by the gradual decay of mineral and vegeta- 
ble substances. The plant devours the rock, and 
the animal devours the plant. Thus the inorganic 
substances of the earth become organized and fit 
for the support of the material life of man. The 
little elm seed, then, has not sprouted and ex- 
panded in vain, though I destroy it in the infancy 
of its growth. Each one, by combining earth, air, 
and water in its foliage, has organized a few grains 



46 ELM SEEDS. 

of inorganic matter ; and its decay will help to 
enrich the garden for another year. 

In the air we breathe infinitesimal seeds are 
constantly floating, imperceptible to any of our 
senses, but clinging to any damp surface, over 
which the air passes, and vegetating with wonder- 
ful rapidity into the curious growth that covers our 
food, our clothing, our books, with mould and 
mildew, unless we are watchful to guard against 
them, by abundant ventilation. The use of this 
lowest form of vegetable life, which often becomes 
so troublesome and so offensive to man, seems to 
be to hasten the decay of all dead organic matter, 
thereby reducing it to a state in which it may sub- 
serve the use of a higher form of living, vegetable 
matter. 

The Heavenly Husbandman is sowing seed, 
everywhere and at all times, without stint or 
measure : and covering the earth with vegetable 
growth faster than man can make use of it. So, 
too ? He is sowing seed in our minds every moment 
of our lives. Every time that the senses take 
cognizance of sight or sound, of taste or smell or 
touch, a seed is sown ; and every time a thought 
or feeling is aroused within us, a seed has ger- 
minated. These seeds spring up in our minds just 



ELM SEEDS. 47 

as they do in the garden ; bad and good, whole- 
some food and noxious poisons, fair flowers and 
unsightly weeds. There is, however, this differ- 
ence : The garden gives growth, without voluntary 
choice, to whatever germinates in its soil ; but the 
mind of man, being endowed with free agency, 
gives growth only to what it loves. The Divine 
Gardener tends and nourishes the good seed that 
He plants in our minds, but He never pulls up the 
weeds that are planted there by the evil influences 
of the world. Just so fast as we pull up the 
weeds, He plants good seed in their places ; but 
He does this only on condition that we first pull 
up the weeds. We begin to do this just as soon 
as we begin heartily to wish for good seed, and to 
feel our entire dependence upon Him for it. Love 
of the world and pride of character may induce us 
to pull up many weeds ; but they are powerless to 
plant good seed. They only leave the ground 
swept and garnished, ready for weeds seven times 
worse than the first to spring up and overshadow 
the land with narcotic poisons that lull the soul 
into the sleep of death. 

Some persons suppose that the human soul 
becomes regenerate by new and holy affections 
crowding out the old and unholy ones ; but we 



48 ELM SEEDS. 

may as well hope to crowd the weeds out of our 
gardens by planting roses and lilies among them, 
as to rely on what Dr. Chalmers has called the 
" expulsive power of new affections " to drive the 
old leaven of unrighteousness from the heart. 
The weeds must be torn up and cast away before 
the good seed can find room to spread its roots 
downward and its leaves upward. 

They who strive to adopt virtues into their souls 
without first having learned to hate their own 
vices, and ceased to habituate themselves to them, 
produce a result corresponding to the gardens that 
may often be seen about the country, where the 
seeds of good things are sown, and the roots of 
fruit-bearing vines and trees are planted, but taken 
no care of afterwards. They look as if there had 
been days in the spring when the desire after good 
things became active in the owner's mind ; but the 
true love of cultivation being wanting, the tall 
weeds soon overtop and choke the growth of the 
plants useful to man, while the couch-grass coat- 
ing the surface, shows that its roots must form a 
net-work everywhere beneath the soil, and by the 
time the autumn comes will have taken possession 
of the whole. One may gather a few currants 
here and a handful of strawberries there, and per- 



ELM SEEDS. 49 

haps a fruit-tree may testify by a cluster of nice 
apples or pears what its whole growth would have 
borne had it been duly cared for ; but the result 
of the whole is a melancholy failure, and a simple 
field of grass would have given the eye more 
pleasure and the mind more satisfaction. 

This is no fanciful analogy ; no idle invention 
of the imagination ; but a true correspondence. 
Strive after virtue as we may, while our souls are 
still unconverted, hereditary evil is pervading our 
whole being, and constantly springing forth into 
sinful words and works ; and though we may 
ever and anon check its external manifestations, it 
is still full of vitality within our hearts, like the 
couch-grass, whose roots traverse the under-soil of 
our gardens, ready to start above ground at every 
joint of their prolonged fibres, whenever the rain 
moistens them and the heat of the sun reaches 
them. The vices, too, that have been ingrafted 
upon us by external circumstances and associations, 
though not so deeply rooted, nor so intimately en- 
twined in our natures, often spring into a more 
showy growth ; like the tall rank w-eeds, which, 
though they have but little depth beneath the sur- 
face, spread a top so large as to overshadow the 
useful plants of more humble growth. 
4 



50 ELM SEEDS. 

If we endeavor to plant new virtues in the soil 
where old vices are still growing we are striving to 
serve two masters ; we are putting forth our hand 
to the plough and yet looking back ; we are trying 
to take up the cross without denying self; and we 
have the assurance of the Divine Word that all 
such attemots are made in vain. 




¥ E E. D S . 



— -««^<>#»*»— 



" The noisome weeds, that without profit suck 
The soil's fertility from wholesome flowers." 

Shakspeare. 



<SS^22Z> 




IV. 



WEEDS. 



($lj||)HE word weed has been defined in various 
|Sjy| ways. Some authorities give it the nega- 
tive definition of " a plant out of place ; " others 
give it the positive definition of "a useless or 
noxious herb." Since a weed corresponds to 
falses, the positive signification is the one which 
seems nearest the truth. 

We sometimes say of a desirable plant that it 
grows, or spreads, like a weed ; but the mind re- 
cognizes a difference between such and the true 
weed. So the exaggeration of virtues is some- 
times perceived to run into something vicious ; but 
still the mind acknowledges an essential difference 
between these, and vices that are so by their 
original constitution. 

Since the Almighty is the Creator of all things, 
it becomes a question of interest why He created 
(53) 



54 WEEDS. 

weeds ; and why He sows them so thickly over the 
earth. 

In its broadest meaning, the earth and all that 
it contains corresponds to the races of men who 
people its surface. In a narrower sense it repre- 
sents the individual man. 

He who studies the natural sciences only in 
their relation to each other, or in order that he 
may find out how they can be made to minister to 
the material wants of man, stands only at the 
threshold of the great temple of nature. He is 
like one who reads the Bible and sees in it only an 
admirable book of laws, whereby men may be 
controlled and society harmoniously organized m 
this world ; but does not accept it as the veritable 
Word of God, spoken in order that men might 
become wise unto salvation. What the Bible 
teaches by language, the earth teaches by types 
and figures. 

Weeds were not created, and do not grow so 
rankly, because they are in themselves good, 
although while they live they do their part in con- 
suming the carbonic acid gas with which the atmos- 
phere becomes loaded by the breath of animals, 
and in their decay by enriching the soil, even as 
the Psalmist tells us the wrath of man is over- 



WEEDS. 55 

ruled to praise the Lord, and its remainder re- 
strained. They were created for our instruction, 
and are permitted to infest our cultivated ground 
to show us how false doctrines spring up in our 
hearts, and turn what should correspond to a well- 
tended garden into that which is represented by 
a tangled labyrinth of unsightly and useless or 
noxious weeds. 

Those regions of the earth where man lives in a 
purely savage state, represent the human race 
destitute of the truths of religious faith, abounding 
here in natural goodness and there in natural 
wickedness, sometimes teeming with fertility and 
beauty, and sometimes barren and repulsive. In 
the more general meaning of this correspondence 
savage nations are typified; but it applies with 
equal truth and force to show us our own individual 
state before we awake to the necessity of regene- 
ration. 

Man, in the progress of civilization, becomes 
pastoral before he learns to be agricultural. To 
feed his flocks and herds he seeks for the natural 
pastures of the earth, where they may find grass, 
and uses some simple means for protecting and 
encouraging its growth. Grass, the most simple 
form of vegetable growth that is widely useful to 



56 WEEDS. 

man, is the type of that goodness and truth which 
come into life when man first begins to acknowl- 
edge his dependence upon the Heavenly Father, 
and to desire to obey Him. It is the lowest form 
of goodness and truth, such as reforms the exter- 
nal life, but does not bring the whole heart and 
mind into willing obedience ; for grass is not food 
for man, but only for harmless brutes, such as are 
made subservient to the wants of man. The soul is 
planted only with grass when man lives in a state 
of natural obedience to the laws of God, just as 
the ox and the horse live in obedience to the hand 
that feeds them, but without that free growth of 
the affections which results in the entire bowing 
down of the whole spiritual man before the throne 
of the Heavenly Father, whom he worships with 
the joyous freedom of perfect love. The higher 
states of regenerate life are represented by corn, 
the varieties of which are all grasses, but bearing 
seeds which are fit for the use of man. Corn 
growing in the fields is, like the grass of the pas- 
ture, the type of natural goodness, but of a much 
higher order ; because its seeds, by grinding and 
baking, can be transformed into bread, or other 
food for man, so nutritious and wholesome to the 
body that it is the type which represents the celes- 



WEEDS. 57 

tial goodness of the Lord, which nourishes and 
sustains the growth of the soul. 

All wholesome fruits and seeds correspond to 
different forms of goodness and truth ; for the 
soul requires variety of nutriment no less than the 
body, and the All-Beneficent Father creates want 
and supply with an even hand. Could man but 
be content with Eden, — could his soul crave only 
that which favors its heavenly growth, the instruc- 
tion to be gained from weeds would have been un- 
necessary, and the trouble they occasion us would 
have been spared. 

In order that man should be capable of good- 
ness above that of the brutes, he must be created 
free ; and he can be free to do good only so far as 
he is also free to do evil. As the forms of beauty 
and utility in the vegetable world illustrate, for 
our example, the virtues and graces of the soul, 
so its unsightly and noxious forms illustrate, for 
our warning, the vices and deformities that destroy 
the image and likeness of God in the spiritual 
body of man. 

The tendency of the soil to produce weeds is 
commensurate with the enrichment bestowed upon 
it ; just as the tendency to embrace false doctrines 
in the mind of man is commensurate with his in- 



58 WEEDS. 

tellectual cultivation. The Lord tells us that while 
we are blind we are free from sin, but when we 
say we see, our sin remaineth. Uncultivated 
tracts of country correspond to man ignorant of 
religious truth. Here the ground is not encum- 
bered with weeds, and many wild flowers and 
fruits are produced, which are pleasant and bene- 
ficial to -man. When something more and better 
is desired the turf is torn up by the plough-share, 
the natural flowers and fruits destroyed, and the 
seed of something esteemed more valuable is 
planted. The weeds are now sure to spring up 
side by side with the product of the good seed, 
and the struggle commences between nature and 
cultivation. Here is imaged the warfare of regen- 
eration, and in the more or less careful cultivation 
of the field and the garden, which meets the eye 
as we traverse the country, each one of us may 
find the state of his own soul represented. While 
the turf remains unbroken in the pasture there is 
rest ; but no sooner does the plough-share stir up 
the capacities of the soil than unceasing watchful- 
ness and labor are called for. So there is quiet in 
the soul so long as that natural innocence of the 
mind continues which is the result of ignorance ; 
but when truth breaks up this superficial virtue, 



WEEDS. 59 

and opens the soul to the influx of heavenly light, 
we begin to experience that the Son of Man came 
not to bring peace to the earth, but a sword. The 
war begins between good and evil, truth and 
falsehood. If we look forth upon our gardens we 
may learn much that will help us to understand 
the nature of this conflict ; and in studying the 
success of the flowers and fruits of summer and 
autumn we may learn to comprehend many of the 
results brought about by the culture we bestow 
upon our own souls. 

If we are careful to remove the weeds in the 
early part of the season, comparatively few spring 
up as the autumn approaches, and the offspring of 
the good seed finds, week by week, less opposition 
to contend with. Happy are those who work 
while it is spring-time in the garden of their souls ; 
for vices that have been left to grow in the strong 
heat of the summer of life are very hard to up- 
root ; and if we suffer them to abide till autumn 
we have little right to hope for anything but a 
winter of despair. 




SQUIRRELS. 



— «<<3< > »^ 



" I said of laughter, it is mad." 

" There is a time to laugh."— Solomon. 



~*suif>~ 




V, 



SQUIRKELS 



Ijl^NTIL quite recently troops of the little 
§^§1% striped squirrel have formed a pretty feature 
of my garden and its neighborhood. A large 
walnut tree near the house furnished them with 
their winter stores, and their merry gambols were 
a source of almost constant entertainment during 
the warmer months. Nothing could be more 
graceful than their mode of traversing the whole 
village, leaping from tree to tree with a rapidity 
and ease that seemed almost like the flight of a 
bird. No one, for a long time, thought of dis- 
turbing them, and they multiplied from year to 
year, and grew more familiar as they found 
nothing in the treatment they received to awaken 
their fears. 

Nothing could seem more harmless than these 
happy little creatures ; but, as their numbers in- 
(63) 



64 SQUIRRELS. 

creased, it was found that they were so destructive 
to the fruit of the pear tree that it became evident 
we must make our choice between destroying the 
squirrels or giving up this delicious fruit to their 
enjoyment. A neighboring sportsman soon set- 
tled the question beyond debate ; and now, though 
I miss the squirrels, I should not be willing to re- 
call them at the price of the fruit. Their destruc- 
tion of the pears was the more aggravating, be- 
cause they ate nothing but the seeds. With their 
sharp little teeth they would cut off the flower end 
of the fruit, as if with a knife, just above the 
seeds ; and, after picking these out, leave the stem 
end hanging upon the tree. The quantity of fruit 
they would destroy in a single day was quite as- 
tonishing. 

Another vexatious trick of these graceful little 
animals, is their fondness for robbing birds' nests ; 
devouring the eggs, or the recently-hatched birds, 
with great avidity. 

A few days since, as I was driving through a 
retired wood, my attention was attracted by the 
cries and alarmed excitement of two birds flutter- 
ing around the bough of a tree that overhung the 
way. I stopped to ascertain what was the matter, 
and soon found sufficient cause for the distress of 



SQUIRRELS. 65 

the poor birds in the person of a squirrel, who had 
ensconced himself in their nest, looking as much 
at home as if he were there of right. 

The birds were of the smallest variety of spar- 
row, scarcely larger than humming-birds, and so 
much smaller than the squirrel, that their attacks, 
as they pounced upon him in their circling flights, 
seemed not to disturb his enjoyment in the least. 

When I first caught sight of him he had an egg 
entirely within his jaws, which he could not quite 
close over it, so that I could see the shell all 
round his mouth between his teeth. He seemed 
to use a good deal of care in breaking the shell, 
as if he feared losing its contents, and then took 
one half of it out of his mouth with his right paw 
and tossed it from him, and then with the other 
paw removed the other half, with a jaunty sort of 
impertinence, as if he wished to show me he was 
quite at his ease out of my reach. For a few 
seconds he seemed to give himself up to the enjoy- 
ment of the delicate morsel, like a veritable epi- 
cure; then folding himself up, as if he intended 
passing the day in his stolen quarters, he put his 
head on one side, and fixed his keen little black 
eyes upon me, with an air that seemed to say, 
" And now, what do you propose doing about it ?" 



66 SQUIRRELS. 

I watched him for some minutes ; unable to reach 
him with any weapon I had at command, and 
then, finding he kept his position as if he never 
meant to stir, so long as I continued looking at 
him, I drove on, leaving the old birds still circling 
about him, and darting down upon him in vain 
efforts to drive him away. 

It is difficult to restrain one's self from feelings 
of anger and resentment on seeing animals prey- 
ing upon other animals ; and yet it seems to be a 
law of the Divine Providence that each family of 
the animal races should be decimated to serve as 
food for some other family. Where any species is 
protected from such destruction it soon becomes so 
numerous as to be troublesome, and perhaps even 
injurious, although it may seem in its nature, like 
the squirrel, perfectly harmless and innocent. 
Restraint seems to be the first law of order in all 
created things. Without it everything impinges 
upon the liberty of its neighbor. 

So, in the mind of man, no one trait, however 
innocent it may seem, can be indulged without re- 
straint and not prevent the due development of 
other traits. Take for instance the playfulness of 
the mind, which seems to correspond to the gam- 



SQUIREELS. 67 

bols of the squirrel. This is one of the most 
pleasing attributes of childhood, and it is very de- 
sirable that it should be retained through life, for 
it helps to lighten care and to keep the mind fresh 
and buoyant. Still, this trait must, like every 
other quality of the mind, be restrained, or it be- 
comes positively vicious in its development, de- 
generating into a levity that saps the foundation of 
all those serious views of life which are absolutely 
essential in the formation of a character of any 
moral worth. 

Levity is often an amusing trait, and when ac- 
companied by grace and beauty has sometimes a 
fascinating power, when one is unconscious of, 
or indifferent to, its dangerous tendencies. Pleas- 
ing persons, in whom levity is a dominant vice, are 
often excused for the faults, and even the sins, into 
which it betrays them ; because, as their apologists 
say, "they are so good-hearted." The phrase 
" good-hearted," when used in this manner, means 
only that the individual has a pleasant way of giv- 
ing an amusing or impertinent reason for his 
wrong doing ; and it implies nothing of that good- 
ness of heart which finds its life in love to the 
Lord and to the neighbor. 



68 SQUIKRELS. 

Playfulness that degenerates into levity is the 
offspring of vanity and irreverence, and contains 
no element of goodness. There is no more hope- 
less state of the mind than when it finds pleasure 
in sporting with what others deem sacred, and 
laughing at things morally wrong. 

The sportiveness of the human mind that ex- 
presses itself in laughter is something entirely 
peculiar to the human race. The brute creation 
demonstrate their joy by various bodily move- 
ments, but no one of them has the power of laugh- 
ter. The reason of this is, that laughter is the 
expression of a certain kind of intellectual plea- 
sure. Other animals are purely aifectional, while 
man is intellectual beside being aifectional. All 
animals display the delight of their affections by 
various movements of the body, and man by 
smiles ; but laughter is the result of intellectual 
satisfaction at some novelty of thought. 

Laughter is of two distinct kinds. The one is 
the result of sympathy, the other of antagonism. 
The one laughs with its object, the other laughs at 
it. The one partakes of the character of its ob- 
ject, and may be either good or evil. The other 
always despises its object, and is, by its own nature, 



SQUIEEELS. 69 

necessarily evil. We laugh with the ludicrous ; 
we laugh at the ridiculous. 

The wisest of Jewish kings tells us in one place 
that laughter is madness, and in another that 
there is a time to laugh. When we hear the free, 
ringing, innocent laughter of childhood, we can 
feel that there is a time to laugh. When we hear 
the depreciating, the triumphant, or the bitter 
laugh of manhood, we can understand that it is 
madness. 

The mode in which a person laughs is a very 
sure index of the character. The laugh of early 
childhood is free from sin as the song of birds, or 
the gambols of beasts. The whole being is so 
single that the gayety of the soul dances forth into 
the movements of the body, and the joyousness of 
the affections vibrates along the vocal organization 
with impulses too interior to be formed into words, 
and so they express themselves in laughter. There 
is, perhaps, no purer emotion excited in the adult 
mind than that which we feel when listening to the 
happy laughter of childhood. It carries us back 
to our own early life, and renews within our soul 
glimpses of the time when our angels continually 
beheld the face of the Heavenly Father. 



70 SQUIRREL 

This sweet, childish laughter is rarely retained 
through life. As fast as evil passions are aroused 
in the mind, so fast the character of the laughter 
changes. There is the loud, empty laugh "that 
speaks the vacant mind ; " the tittering of silliness ; 
the coarse laugh of vulgarity ; the scornful laugh 
of the cynic ; the bitter laugh of the misanthrope ; 
the sardonic laugh of the hypocrite ; the exulting 
laugh that rejoices in the inferiority of its subject ; 
the refined, intellectual laugh, which delights in 
subtle distinctions and acute witticisms ; and in the 
depraved, who seldom laugh heartily, there is the 
" depreciating sneer," at which the painter Allston 
used to say he thought the devil must laugh more 
heartily than at anything else. 

The laughter of childhood is almost purely af- 
fectional, and has its life in the same influx from 
heaven that, descending into the lower animals, 
produces gambols and songs. As childhood 
ceases, if its purity remain, this same affection dis- 
plays itself in a happy, smiling countenance, that 
seems radiant with inward joy. There is nothing 
in it that ever suggests the idea of supercilious- 
ness or self-complacency. The kindly old age 
that follows tells every year more and more of 



SQUIRRELS. 71 

purity, and gentleness, and love, and peace. It 
is full of Christian charity, and, though laughing 
seldom, in its laughter it is always sympathetic. 
It laughs only with innocently ludicrous things 
that invite laughter; while ridiculous things at 
which others laugh give it only pain. 




BIRDS AND OTHER THINGS. 



Analogy sometimes carries a clearer conviction to the mind 
than argument. 




VI 



BIRDS AND OTHER THINGS. 




*ALKIIS T G lately along the border of the 



intervale that stretches away for two or 
three miles to the North of my garden, I observed 
a pair of red-winged black-birds flying near me. 
I suppose I had approached their nest, from the 
manner in which they flew around me in rather a 
wide circle ; but keeping sufficiently near to show 
that I was an object of suspicion to them. Some- 
times their flight was rapid, with a quick fluttering 
of the wings ; then they would close the wings 
entirely, and dart a considerable distance through 
the air, descending a little, and looking more like 
a fish than a bird. When they were preparing to 
alight, they floated downward with a movement so 
graceful, and withal so gentle, that it could be com- 
pared to nothing but that of a wreath of smoke. 
They almost always chose some slender weed for 
(75) 



76 BIRDS AND OTHER THINGS. 

their alighting place, which one would have sup- 
posed too feeble to sustain them, but which swayed 
so slightly under their weight that it seemed as if 
there were some secret sympathy between the 
plant and the bird, by which the one became 
strong to bear, while the other became light to 
be borne. 

The way in which the crimson feathers of the 
outer side of the wing came into view and then 
disappeared again, as the birds circled around me, 
was very beautiful. Sometimes only the jetty 
black of the under parts of their little forms could 
be seen. Then a sudden turn in their flight would 
bring the crimson feathers flashing in the sun, and 
make them gaudy as butterflies. 

While I stood watching them, a crow came in 
sight, and sailed heavily over the meadow, pur- 
sued by a little bird who, having mounted into a 
higher region of the air, and being much quicker 
in its movements than the crow, was able to tor- 
ment him by darting down and striking his back 
with its bill, in a way that evidently tormented the 
great, clumsy bird; but from which he seemed 
quite unable to escape. 

The grace and elegance of the black-birds, the 
ponderous weight of the crow, and the agile 



BIRDS AND OTHER THINGS. 77 

combativeness of the little bird, thus brought 
into direct contrast, offered an interesting illustra- 
tion of some of the doctrines of correspondences, 
as they have been given us through Swedenborg. 

All winged animals correspond to thoughts, true 
or false, wise or foolish, pacific or combative, pure 
or unclean. 

Endlessly varied as are the tribes of insects and 
of birds, even so varied are the thoughts that 
throng the brain of man. The old Greeks, when 
they called man a microcosm or little universe, 
comparing him with the macrocosm or great uni- 
verse, uttered a literal and precise truth. It is 
probable that this truth was handed down orally 
from the most ancient Church that dwelt in Eden, 
and the wise Greeks could see, in a general way, 
that it was a truth. In the light of the New 
Church we are enabled to perceive this truth with 
a particularity to which the Greeks could not have 
attained, and which fills the natural sciences with 
a life and interest hitherto unknown. 

To know ourselves is of the utmost importance, 
in order that we may be able rightly to cultivate 
ourselves ; and for this reason the world around 
us was created a vast mirror, in which our thoughts 



78 BIRDS AND OTHER THINGS 

and affections, which constitute the all of our hu- 
manity, are reflected. 

The love and the wisdom of the Heavenly- 
Father, coining down into the world of matter, 
are shaped by His power into the various orders of 
existence. Every mineral, every vegetable, and 
every animal creation, if it be innocent, is the ex- 
pression of some Divine affection or thought. On 
these Jehovah looks and declares them good. 
These are created to lead us upward toward Him, 
by showing us the beauty of the Divine order. 
These are the music of the universe, attuned into 
heavenly harmonies ; and we harmonize with them 
when we love the Lord with the whole heart, and, 
because we so love Him, love the neighbor as 
ourselves. 

But there are discords as well as harmonies in 
the universe ; things noxious as well as beneficent ; 
fearful as well as lovely. These too exist from 
the power of God, but by His permission, not by 
His approval. In them are mirrored the traits of 
man's soul, distorted by love of self and love of 
the world. Passions like wild beasts, that hide 
themselves from the light of day in dens of false- 
hood, to prowl secretly in darkness and destroy 
the neighbor. Lusts that crawl like ' _ A "?es upon 



BIRDS AXD OTHER THINGS. 79 

the earth, defiling it with their touch. Thoughts 
that soar with strong wing, as if to scale the 
heavens, but in reality only the better to scan the 
earth for living prey, or, baser yet, for carrion. 
Fantasies soaring in clouds like locusts, obscuring 
the light of the heavenly sun, and then falling 
upon every green thing that sun vivifies, leav- 
ing nothing in their track but desolation and 
famine. 

Man's spiritual nature is not yet sufficiently 
educated to enable him to comprehend his own 
soul, so as to perceive all the correspondences that 
have relation to it in the world around him. En- 
ough may however be learned to be of great use 
to him in self-analysis, and the capacity for learn- 
ing increases wonderfully by use. Every time we 
make a direct personal application to ourselves of 
what we have already learned, we cast out some 
portion of that blinding beam of self-love which 
makes it so hard for us to perceive the truth ; for 
it is not abstractly studying the truth, but doing 
it, that gives us the ability to know the doc- 
trines. 

Whatever we see around us has its correspon- 
dence within us, either in the natural or the spir- 
itual part of our being. As we contemplate the 



80 BIRDS AND OTHER THINGS. 

external objects of nature we should not stop when 
we have admired or condemned, when we have 
experienced either delight or disgust. In all our 
observations we should bear in mind that what we 
contemplate is the type of something within our- 
selves ; that everything we see corresponds to and 
illustrates some active principle, or some latent 
capacity, either good or evil, within our own souls. 
When we contemplate things evil or noxious, if 
we do not remember that we have a capacity for a 
corresponding evil in our own nature, our self- 
esteem is stimulated, and we gain only harm from 
what we see ; but if we keep this truth in mind 
our humility is awakened, and we are put upon 
our guard against giving way to the impulses of 
our lower nature. So in observing things good, 
if we are not awake to the truth that here is some- 
thing for our imitation, something to guide us in 
the formation of our own souls, we gain no more 
to our spiritual being than we should gain to our 
natural bodies if we took food into our mouths 
and then neglected to swallow it. 

The same truth holds good in our observations 
of our fellow beings. If we study human nature 
in the neighbor, unmindful of our common hu- 
manity, all that we see of evil makes us censorious 



BIRDS AXD OTHER THINGS. 81 

or self-complacent ; and we constantly grow more 
fond of finding out and condemning evil in those 
around us, forgetting that as we judge, even so 
shall we be judged. When, on the contrary, we 
remember our common brotherhood, we see the 
vices of the neighbor with pain ; and feeling our 
own liability to fall in the same way, we judge him 
compassionately, and are put upon our guard 
against falling into a similar vice in our own per- 
sons. In the one case we are learning to hate the 

neighbor, in the other to love him. In the one 
case we are cultivating hardness of heart, in the 
other we arejearning to be perfect after the man- 
ner in which the Heavenly Father is perfect. 




THE SOWING OF SEED. 



■ *« s<>a »» » 



'■' Sow with a generous hand, 
Pause not for toil or pain, 
Weary not through the heat of summer, 
Weary not through the cold spring rain, 
But wait till the autumn cometh, 
For the sheaves of golden grain." 



-*$/%*- 








vn. 

THE SOWING OF SEED. 

^HERE is no garden process more instruc- 
tive than the sowing of seed. Sow it care- 
fully as we may, it often comes to naught, for 
several circumstances must combine to make it 
spring up and grow. In the first place it must be 
good seed, then it must not be sown carelessly on 
the surface of the earth, nor buried too deeply be- 
low the surface. Then the soil must Ije appro- 
priate to the kind of seed we sow, and it must be 
well dug up, and prepared to nourish the little 
plant when it begins to grow. All these prelimi- 
naries being attended to, we still are not sure of 
the result, because that, finally, depends on the de- 
scent of a due proportion of sunshine and of rain, 
over which we have no control. Though we do 
all that we know how to do, we still work in igno- 
rance of the final result of our efforts. Should 
(85) 



86 THE SOWING OF SEED. 

this discourage us, or make us less willing to sow 
our seeds ? Surely not ; for though we may be 
many times disappointed, we are also sure of many 
times succeeding. Only let us be patient, and re- 
member that Providence is over all, the least as 
well as the greatest, of the efforts of our lives. 
In the garden, as everywhere else, we learn that 
there is a power above us that controls all things ; 
and our disappointments, when we do all that it 
is in our power to do to insure success, never 
come any oftener than we need them to check the 
pride and presumption of our self-love. Results 
are in the hand of Infinite Love and Infinite Wis- 
dom, and are measured out in perfect adaptation 
to the needs of each individual. Happy are we if 
we accept the lesson that each success and each 
disappointment is designed to teach. Happy are 
we if, though we may be unable to comprehend 
the lesson, we use our success as a talent entrusted 
to us by our Heavenly Father, or bow before our 
disappointment in humble faith that He withholds 
success because we are not in a state to be benefit- 
ed by it. 

Our whole lives are a continual sowing of seed ; 
for not only every thing we say and do, but even 
our silence and indolence, are seeds which, sooner 



THE SOWING OF SEED. 87 

or later, will produce each its appropriate harvest. 
We scatter words carelessly around us as if 
nothing were to come of them ; but they are ever 
liable to find a place where they may take root in 
the mind of some person who hears them, and we 
should beware that the seed we thus sow is such 
that good fruit may be its result. If thistles are 
suffered to grow in our own garden, the seeds will 
surely blow over and take root in some garden 
near us ; and just so will the idle words that over- 
flow from our evil passions cling in the mind of 
some neighbor, and bring forth fruit to our shame. 
Our example, top, sows seeds more deeply and 
effectually than our words, and this should make 
us doubly careful what we do. In a careless and 
unthrifty neighborhood, if one individual puts his 
own place in order, an example and a stimulus are 
given to others, and in a little while the aspect of 
the whole village will be changed to neatness and 
order. In like manner the example of a truly de- 
vout and virtuous life is a blessing that we cannot 
measure to all who come within its influence. 
There is no exhortation so eloquent, no reasoning 
so unanswerable. We must not, however, think 
too much of sowing the gardens around us ; for 
in that case we shall be liable to neglect our own, 



88 THE SOWING OF SEED. 

and it is there our first duty lies. ISlo amount of 
care for the interest of the neighborhood will com- 
pensate for unfaithfulness at home. If we pluck 
up the noxious weeds at home before the seeds 
ripen, we shall be sure of doing no injury to the 
neighbor by planting evil seed in his ground, and 
we shall make space for the growth of good and 
beautiful plants in our garden that may furnish 
seed for others by and by. Only let us be careful 
to retain seed enough for our own ground. We 
may think so much of giving the truth to others 
that we forget to make any application of it to 
ourselves, thereby making our gift of no avail ; for 
preaching has little or no effect unless enforced 
and illustrated by a life in accordance with its pre- 
cepts. 

When a child first begins gardening, he is so 
impatient to see the result of his work that he is 
almost sure to dig up his seeds in order to find if 
they are sprouting. The parent looks on and per- 
haps smiles complacently at the child's folly, bid- 
ding him be patient for a few days till the little 
plants have time to show themselves. Yet it is 
quite probable that that very parent treats the 
seeds of thought he sows in the mind of the child 
with an impatience just as foolish as that of the 



THE SOWING OF SEED. 89 

child over his flower-seeds. He tells him a truth 
and expects it to spring up and bear fruit as soon 
as it is sown. He looks to reap the harvest in the 
character of his child before the seed time is over. 
He probes his child's heart with questions to find 
out if the truth he sows is germinating before the 
warmth of the Divine Love has had opportunity 
to expand the germ and quicken it into life. He 
will not wait for the gradual way in which the 
Divine Providence, through the ministry of cir- 
cumstance, quickens the spiritual nature of the 
child ; and then by the rain of His truth and the 
sunshine of His love causes the seeds sown, it 
may be years before, and lying till then darkly and 
inertly, to take root and grow, and bear fruit 
many fold. 

Seeds have many ways of springing. Some of 
them come up almost immediately, and in a few 
weeks are covered with bloom. Others come up, 
but remain of little worth during the first year of 
their life, blooming only the second. Others again 
require long terms of years to bring the time of 
the blossom and the fruit ; and it is the' plants of 
the greatest value that, for the most part, require 
the longest time to arrive at perfection. In one 
point they all agree. Before there is any growth 



90 THE SOWING OF SEED, 

upward into the light and air, there is always a 
growth downward, in darkness and secrecy. The 
delicate rootlets must first clasp the earth, and be 
prepared to draw nourishment from it, before the 
tender blade begins to grow. All this corresponds 
precisely with the growth of the principles of 
truth in the human mind ; and all this should teach 
us to sow patiently, and wait the Lord's good time 
for the springing of the seed and the whitening of 
the harvest. Our touch is too rude to permit our 
opening the ground with safety ; and we must con- 
tent ourselves with letting the seed go through the 
first stages of growth in the secret places of the 
soul, that can be penetrated only by the eye of 
Omniscience. 

In like manner we must be patient with our- 
selves. We understand little, if anything, more 
of the growth of truth inward in our own souls 
than in the souls of neighbors ; but this inward 
growth must, nevertheless, take place before there 
can be any outward sign. We cannot tell whence 
or how the Holy Spirit breathes the breath of life 
into the soul. There are times when we feel as if 
we were making no progress. Our minds seem so 
dead that nothing can grow there, just as the earth 
lies in our gardens when long, cold rains come 



THE SOWING OF SEED. 91 

after seed-sowing. We must wait and watch, 
sustained by faith that the sun is behind the clouds, 
and will after a while prevail over them. Mean- 
while we must not let the weeds grow and choke 
the ground, for then there will not be room enough 
for the good plants. It is not the will of the 
Divine Gardener that any of His seed should 
perish ; and it will not, if we keep the ground 
clear of weeds, and softened by cultivation, so 
that the warmth of the sun may penetrate it, and 
the little roots may be able to find their way be- 
tween its particles. In other words we must resist 
all temptation to do evil, and must strive to live 
in charity with those around us. Just so far as 
the heart is shut up with selfishness and with in- 
difference to the happiness of those around us, -t 
is hardened against receiving the- influences of the 
Divine Love ; while every kind thought and word 
and deed that warms the heart towards the neigh- 
bor prepares it to receive the life-giving influx that 
comes down to us from Him who has said, " In- 
as much as ye have done it to the least of these ye 
have done it unto me." 

Probably every person who has reached mature 
life has experienced the sudden and unexpected 
quickening of truths that had long lain inert in the 



92 THE SOWING OF SEED. 

mind, and almost forgotten. The being placed in 
new circumstances, bringing out new wants or 
capacities in the mind, or setting in motion new 
trains of thought, will often recall some text of 
Scripture, or some wise saying of man, which we 
long since heard or read without giving any special 
heed to it, but which now rises in the memory and 
suddenly expands into a growth of beauty and of 
power that fills us with surprise and delight. 

In the tribulations and bereavements of life, 
when the heart is bowed down and bruised and 
torn in every fibre, so that it seems impossible its 
wounds can ever heal, after days and weeks, per- 
haps months of despair, all at once, we know not 
how or why, some phrase of consolation will rise in 
the memory like a strain of soft music, and subdue 
us into listening silence, as the stormy waves sank 
into quietness at the ' ' Peace ! Be still ! " of the 
Lord. We had, perhaps, known the words from 
our childhood, but they had never been of any 
personal interest to us before. We had not 
thought of them, it may be, for years. Now they 
come to us with a tender pleading that cannot be 
resisted, and suggest new trains of thought, and 
open new sources of emotion, and there is a great 
calm in the tempest wherein we had been strug- 



THE SOWING OF SEED. 93 

gling so long. We are lost in wonder at what 
manner of power this is that has suddenly taken 
possession of us and subdued us to His own pater- 
nal will, till our anguish and our want of submis- 
sion are lost in the enfolding arms of eternal love. 
The little seed, so small we had never before given 
it a thought, has grown into a great tree, over- 
shadowing our whole being. 

One such experience in a life should suffice to 
teach us the lesson of sowing seed in faith, and 
waiting for its upspringing in patient hope and 
loving charity. One such life experience is better 
than anything the garden can tell us ; but still it 
is pleasant to see how the natural ever illustrates 
the spiritual, and a new interest is given to the 
processes of nature when we observe how they 
correspond with the workings of the spirit. 

Some years since I planted a handful of the red 
seed-vessels of the sweet-brier, without being 
aware how slowly they germinate. I looked for 
them all through the summer in vain, and sup- 
posed they had perished in the ground. The next 
season the earth was dug up without any regard 
to them, and other flowers were planted over them 
that grew and blossomed more readily, but no. sign 
came from the briers. The third year I was care- 



94 THE SOWING OF SEED. 

lessly weeding the spot, not supposing anything 
of worth was there, when I perceived the peculiar 
odor of the sweet-brier. I was puzzled for a mo- 
ment whence it could come, as there were no plants 
of it in the garden that I knew of. Then I re- 
membered that here was the spot where I had so 
long since planted the seeds, and on carefully sepa- 
rating the weeds I found ten little briers, which, 
though scarce an inch in height, filled the air all 
around them with delicious fragrance. They have 
grown and flourished since into tall and graceful 
plants, and as I look upon them they preach me 
this sermon. 

When you sow precious seed, have faith that it 
will, under the Heavenly Father's Providence, some 
day spring into life ; and in the name of Ham who 
has said, I will not break the bruised reed, nor 
quench the smoking flax, I conjure you beware 
that in rudely plucking up weeds you do not de- 
stroy the infant germs of immortal and heavenly 
life. Not only must you sow your seeds with 
care, but you must also be tender of the little 
plants. Silence your impatience when it tells you 
that the seeds of truth have died in the mind of 
him whom you would influence; neither be too 
eager in your endeavors to weed out the vices that 



THE SOWING OF SEED. 95 

may obstruct their growth. By too impatient or 
rude a handling you may kill or discourage his 
virtues. In plucking the mote from his eye, if 
your touch be not delicate you will, at the same 
time, quench his sight. 




ABOUT SEEDS. 






The seed with its germ and its albumen, the cause and the end 
of all vegetable life, is the type of the Divine Wisdom with its 
truth and its goodness, the cause and the end of all spiritual life. 



^2ffl22? 




vm. 



ABOUT SEEDS. 



(||ffl)HE seed is the beginning and the end of all 
igjyg plants. From it the plant springs, and to 
produce it the whole plant tends. When a plant 
has gone to seed, it has completed a cycle of ex- 
istence. With many plants there is but one such 
cycle. The seed being perfected, the plant withers 
away, its whole use performed. Other plants 
produce seed year after year ; but still the produc- 
ing of the seed is the crowning act of their lives ; 
the completion of a cycle. 

The seed is composed of two parts ; the germ, 
and the albumen, which is the food on which the 
germ is to live during the first stage of its growth. 
The development of the germ requires moisture, 
warmth, and air, in order that the albumen may 
be softened so that it can be absorbed by the germ, 
and in order to quicken the germ so that it may be 
(99) 



100 ABOUT SEEDS. 

in a state to absorb the food prepared for it. Light 
impedes, and sometimes even prevents germina- 
tion, by producing a chemical change in the albu- 
men that renders it unfit for nourishing the germ. 
The germ is the form of life in the seed, the albu- 
men its essence. Either separated from the other 
cannot live and grow. The germ is as it were the 
body, and the albumen the soul of the seed. 

The germs of seeds are so small that they have 
very little value as food for man ; but the albumen 
forms a very large proportion of tbe food of the 
human race. In all the cereal grains, in rice, and 
all the seeds and nuts that man uses for food, it is 
the albumen that nourishes his life. The albumen 
that is created expressly as food for germs, be- 
comes also the bread of life for the material body 
of man. 

Man has two bodies, the one material, the other 
spiritual. He does not live by bread alone, but 
by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth 
o£ God. Precisely as bread sustains his material 
life, so the Word of God sustains his spiritual 
life. 

Truth, as it comes from God, is never separated 
from goodness. Truth is the germ in the seed 
that God sows, and it is always sustained and 



ABOUT SEEDS. 101 

nourished by the albumen of goodness. E very- 
Divine truth is a germ that grows because it is a 
form adapted to receive the inflowing life of good- 
ness. If a truth lies in the mind without any 
appropriate accompanying goodness, it dies there 
as surely as a seed dies in the ground if the albu- 
men is separated from the germ. 

It is one of the besetting sins of man to desire 
to separate truth from goodness ; to strive after 
salvation by faith alone. The belief in the saving 
power of faith is not confined to the sects that 
hold it as a dogma, but is one of the most common 
traits in the mind of man. He is ever fancying 
that he shall finally be saved by the good thoughts 
he entertains, though his life may be far from ex- 
emplifying them. 

We read the life of some admirable man, or the 
story of some noble deed, or we hear preached a 
delineation of some exalted virtue, and our en- 
thusiasm is excited, and we fancy that we possess 
in ourselves capacities for the virtues we admire ; 
and that opportunity alone is wanting to enable us 
to exemplify them in our own lives. We feel so 
good as we read or listen, that we are quite sure 
we must be quite as good as we feel. Others 
may deny the Lord, but we never can. Within 



102 ABOUT SEEDS. 

the hour, as it were before the cock crows, the 
opportunity is given us to do something requiring 
but a tithe of the sacrifice or the effort we have 
been admiring, and we refuse to do it. We are 
told perhaps a second and a third time that it is 
our duty, but we deny it ; we know nothing of 
this man whom we are supposed to follow and to 
serve. If there is a genuine love of goodness in 
our hearts, founded upon an acknowledgment of 
the Lord as the only source of true goodness, 
the cock will crow before we have done with the 
matter; and we shall, like Peter, acknowledge 
our sin with repentant tears. If, on the con- 
trary, we love goodness only because the abstract 
contemplation of it makes us feel happy by ex- 
citing a self-complacent idea that we also are 
good, we are aiming at salvation by faith alone, 
and there is no true love of goodness in us. We 
are separating the ideal from the real, the true 
from the good, faith from works. Our spiritual 
nature does not live by the undivided words of 
God. We are separating the parts of the Divine 
seed that is given for our nutriment, and our 
spiritual bodies can never be developed into the 
image and likeness of the Divine Being, who 
created us with capacities by means of which we 



ABOUT SEEDS. 103 

might attain to heavenly happiness, by resem- 
bling Him. 

In turning from the temptation to believe in 
salvation by faith alone, we are liable to fall into 
the opposite one of believing in salvation by works 
alone. This belief often results in a life of great 
external purity, but it is very sure to engender 1 a 
pride and self-complacency that is quite foreign 
to that denial of self which the Lord so constantly 
inculcates. This has been carried to such an ex- 
tent that it is not uncommon to hear pride spoken 
of as a virtue. The phrases, proper pride, be- 
coming pride, and even virtuous pride, are used 
by many with apparent unconsciousness that there 
is anything in them opposed to the words of 
Christ; but if we exalt pride among the virtues, 
how are we to dispose of the inculcations to hu- 
mility, meekness, and self-denial with which the 
gospels abound. To deny self is the first require- 
ment the Lord makes of us ; the initial step into 
the Christian life ; while pride is the very opposite 
of this, and so entirely incompatible with it that 
both cannot exist in the same mind* excepting 
in a state of warfare which must result in the 
triumph of one and the destruction of the other ; 



104 ABOUT SEEDS. 

whenever the mind becomes established either in 
good or evil, as every mind eventually must. 

When we believe in salvation by works alone, 
we reject the germ from the seed the Heavenly 
Gardener plants in our minds, and so the truth 
ceases to grow within us. We soon get to think 
that it is of no consequence what we believe, or 
whether we believe anything ; and while our faith 
in God grows daily weaker, our faith in self as 
constantly grows stronger; and the end is that 
we worship self instead of God. 

Whether we reject the germ or the albumen 
from the heavenly seed, the result is alike fatal 
to Christian growth ; for that demands of us to 
accept the whole truth, undivided, as it comes 
down from heaven. We must love the Lord 
supremely, and believe in Him as the only source 
of goodness and truth ; and looking to Him as 
the fountain whence we draw all knowledge of 
what is true, and all power to do that which we 
know, we must be perfect in our daily lives after 
the manner in which our Heavenly Father is per- 
fect. Then we shall be free from the bigotry 
that results from believing in salvation by faith 
alone, and from the pride of life that results from 
believing in salvation by works alone ; for neither 



ABOUT SEEDS. 105 

of these vices can exist in a mind that worships 
the Lord in humility, and loves the neighbor as 
itself. 

If our minds have proved a grateful soil for the 
reception of heavenly seed, we shall desire to scat- 
ter it in turn for the benefit of others. To do this 
wisely, we should remember that if we give the 
bare, hard truth, it is only a germ we have sowed, 
and we have no right to expect that it will grow. 
Our thoughts must be enfolded in our affections, 
and nourished by them, before they can expand, 
and shape themselves into a Christian life, and 
before they can utter themselves in words that will 
express the truth as it comes down to us from the 
Lord. Love is the albumen that nourishes truth. 
If we would teach our neighbor we must love him, 
and we must love the truth. We must love the 
truth because it is the Word of God, and there- 
fore infinitely perfect; and we must love the 
neighbor because he is one of God's children, and 
we owe to him every act of spiritual kindness that 
he will receive from us. 

The Lord describes the Heavenly Gardener 
sowing seed in all soils, and we must imitate Him. 
We cannot be sure of the adaptations of the soils 
in which we sow material seed, for there are secret 



106 ABOUT SEEDS. 

powers m the earth which the chemist has vainly 
sought-to understand, which prevent us from be- 
ing able to decide positively, beforehand, whether 
it is adapted to the kind of seed we wish to sow. 
Far more difficult is it for us to decide upon the 
capacities of the spiritual soils we would cultivate, 
and we shall often be surprised by a rich harvest 
where we sowed with little hope, and disappointed 
by failure where we anticipated success. 

The same traits of character that prepare us for 
receiving heavenly seed to advantage qualify us 
for giving it to others. Humility in receiving, aad 
patience in well-doing, give us the power of be- 
stowing what we receive in a way that will make 
it acceptable to those to whom we give it. What 
we receive humbly we give in the same way ; for 
we hold it and give it as something that is not 
ours, but the Lord's. When we acquire a truth 
and hold it as if it were our own, our pride is 
inflated ; and then, if we try to teach it to another, 
we do it in such a way that we excite his pride in 
opposition to ours, and cause him to close his 
mind against us. It was our truth we were trying 
to give him, and not the Lord's ; therefore the 
Lord could not help us to give it, and we were 
left with no sustaining impulse but that which 



ABOUT SEEDS. 107 

comes from the demon of Pride. The sun and 
the rain of heaven could not reach and soften the 
albumen of such seed, and the germ was dried up 
and destroyed by the fire of earthly passion. 

When we find ourselves angry because people 
do not take the truth we offer, we may be sure 
that we are not offering them the truth as it is in 
Jesus. We may have the form of truth, but we 
have not its spirit ; and we should turn at once 
and examine our own hearts, and convert our- 
selves before we undertake the conversion of 
others. We can give only after the same manner 
that we receive. If we receive in the love of self 
we shall give in the love of self, and have small 
reward for what we do. If we receive in love to 
the Lord, we shall give in the Lord's name, and 
much fruit will be the result. 

Patience in well-doing is the trait second in im- 
portance in qualifying us to sow seed rightly; 
because if we work patiently in cultivating our 
own souls Ave shall appreciate the troubles and 
difficulties that obstruct the progress of others, 
and we shall learn to wait patiently for their 
growth in grace. 

There is great danger of saying too much when 
we would instruct, especially to children. The 



108 ABOUT SEEDS. 

truth is very simple, and does not need to be en- 
larged upon elaborately in order to make it mani- 
fest. We are more apt to obscure it than to 
make it plain by many words. Having spoken 
it, let it be, quietly ; and do not repeat day after 
day the same thing. It is not good to overseed 
ground, for thereby all growth is choked. Remem- 
ber, too, that seeds cannot sprout well in the 
light ; and, therefore, refrain from trying to look 
in upon the early stages of mental growth in your 
child or your friend. The influence of your affec- 
tion going forth constantly in kind words and 
deeds, will keep the truths you give warm and 
soft, like the sunshine and rain of heaven, and 
they will probably germinate in good time ; but if 
they do not, your much talking and watching 
would have done no more good than it would to 
keep stirring up the soil in your garden in order 
to quicken the sprouting of the seeds you plant 
there. 

It is probably overseeding of the mind that 
causes the children of pious but over-anxious 
parents often to grow up with no religion at all. 
Too much preaching is as bad for the soul, as too 
much seed for the soil. No fruitful growth will 
come of it. 



ABOUT SEEDS. 109 

Plant and water as we may, it Is God who 
glveth the increase. We should endeavor to be 
sure that we sow good seed, and that we sow it 
with a loving spirit. Having done that, we should 
not try to compel its growth by perpetually work- 
ing over the soil, nor sow too soon again, nor at 
an inappropriate season, in our eagerness to pro- 
duce a harvest. 




THE CHANGING SEASONS. 



■ ««$ <>fr»»»^ 



Change is the renewing of all things. An atmosphere without 
motion, an ocean without tide, will not more certainly breed 
miasma and death to the body than will unchanging circumstance 
bring stupor and destruction to the soul. 



-*sifp~ 




IX. 



THE CHANGING SEASONS. 




||UTUMN has laid its hand heavily upon my 
\$ garden, and all that remains to be done 
there now is to prepare for winter. There is 
much that is desolate both in Spring and Autumn ; 
but there is a great contrast between the desola- 
tion that precedes the winter and that which fol- 
lows it. Autumn is in itself very beautiful ; far 
more so than the Spring ; but the natural tendency 
of the mind is to mourn in the fall of the leaf, 
and to rejoice in its putting forth. Still no season 
is truly mournful. Each has its appropriate en- 
joyments ; and there is enough to enjoy in each to 
fill the devout heart with thanksgiving. 

We are prone to criticise and condemn things 

as well as persons for what they are not, instead 

of valuing them for what they are. We dwell 

upon their deficiencies instead of their qualifica- 

8 (113) 



114 THE CHANGING SEASONS. 

tions. If we compare Spring and Autumn in 
relation to what they really possess of positive 
beauty, Autumn has a very great superiority ; and 
yet most persons call the Spring the most beauti- 
ful, because then their own imaginations are 
filled with the anticipation of the beauty of Sum- 
mer ; while in Autumn they are blinded to the 
present beauty by the wintry images filling the 
perspective that stretches away before the mind's 
eye. 

In the Spring nothing is left but the bare forms 
of hills and valleys, of forests and scattered trees, 
brown and desolate ; while harsh winds and cold 
rains continually check and disappoint our hopes. 
" Winter lingering in the lap of Spring," allows 
us few days of genial warmth until Summer has 
almost come ; yet we constantly comfort ourselves 
under our disappointments with the hope that 
Summer must come. Until almost the very last 
of the Spring we have nothing of beauty in color 
to gratify the eye as it wanders over the landscape, 
and almost nothing of warmth to console the 
touch ; but we feed on hope day by day, and so 
endow the Spring-time with a beauty not its own. 
Compare the best day that Spring can give us 
with any fine Autumn day, and how poor it seems ! 



THE CHANGING- SEASONS. 115 

The scattering days, and now and then a week of 
what is called the Indian Summer, are unsurpass- 
able for beauty in the Whole circle of the year. 
The air is dry and soft and warm, and the land- 
scape glowing with purple and crimson and gold. 
As I walk through my garden now, if I am 
saddened by the black and withered plants that 
surround me, I have but to lift my eyes to the 
hills, and I am helped. The trees near by have 
most of them cast their leaves ; but their shade, 
that was so grateful in summer, is no longer 
wanted ; and the neighborhood being now less 
embowered, the eye can wander at will over the 
graceful outlines of the hills that encircle the 
view, clothed in robes that seem beautiful enough 
for curtains to paradise. Crimson oaks, and rich 
evergreens, and yellow chestnuts, mingle their 
hues, and golden vistas between the hills invite 
the eye to look for something even more beautiful 
beyond, like gateways leading into a celestial city. 
A fair, high, round hill lies to the westward, 
crowned with a wood of chestnuts, all clad in 
yellow of the softest and richest tint, their rounded 
tops looking like curled, soft wool ; suggesting to 
my fancy a golden fleece spread out in the sun- 
shine. Jason could hardly have needed a vision 



116 THE CHANGING SEASONS. 

more beautiful to lure him onward in his adven- 
turous search. 

For all that affords perfect sensuous delight, I 
know of nothing in the whole circle of the year 
that equals the fine days of Autumn. Genial 
warmth to the touch, exquisite beauty to the eye, 
and for the ear that almost supernatural stillness 
that suggests rest after toil, peace after struggle. 
It is the Sabbath of the year. The labor of the 
seed-time and the harvest is past, and now is the 
season for quiet thought, for counting up our pos- 
sessions, and seeing what we have gathered that 
will sustain us through the winter that is soon to 
come. 

The four seasons are, like all of life, just what 
we choose to make of them. If we accept them 
as gifts from the hand of the Heavenly Father, 
they are all rich in bounty. If we look at them 
without reference to the Divine Hand, they will 
all receive the shadow of our ingratitude, and 
reflect to our minds the discontent we carry to 
them. 

The seasons correspond to the different periods 
of the life of man. Youth, with its little of attain- 
ment and its much of hope; mid-life, with its 
fulness of vigor, bodily and mental; full age, 



THE CHANGING SEASONS. 117 

when the bodily powers become less active, and 
the mind more given to contemplation ; and old 
age, when that which we have actually attained 
through all the preceding seasons is made mani- 
fest ; and the poverty or wealth of the character 
we have been building up is displayed in gloomy 
discontent at the remembrance of the things of 
this world which we are losing, or in peaceful 
happiness at the anticipation of the world we are 
soon to enter. 

The seasons also correspond to the progressive 
states through which we pass in the different pe- 
riods of the mind's development. The inner life 
is counted by years as well as the outer, — spir- 
itual years, having all the varied phases of the 
changing seasons in the natural year. The mind 
has its spring-times of hope, when some new truth 
is germinating within it, and filling it with visions 
of heavenly uses that are to result from it in the 
daily life ; — its summers of joy, as these uses 
develop in kind words and loving deeds ; — its 
autumns of contemplation, when the soul, having 
completed a cycle of progress, and gathered from 
it all the fruits that it can harvest, passes into a 
winter of sadness and desolation, through fear that 
its progress has come to an end, and that it is 



118 THE CHANGING SEASONS. 

capable of no higher growth In grace. These 
winters are sometimes long and very hard to bear, 
and we are tempted under their influence to lose 
faith in the paternal Providence that is ever seek- 
ing to lead us onward in the regenerate life. Evil 
spirits throng the mind at these seasons, striving 
to drag it downward into the insanity of despair. 
To escape the power of these wintry spirits we 
must wrap our spiritual bodies in the garments of 
truth, and quicken them by the faithful perform- 
ance of our daily duties ; and some day when we 
are not looking for it, some hour when we are not 
aware, the light of the Divine Sun will suddenly 
flash upon us, and its warmth thrill through us. 
Thus a new cycle of life will begin for us with its 
succession of seasons, whose history will form a 
new chapter in the Book of our life. 

The length of these spiritual seasons varies with 
each individual ; but as the regenerate life advances, 
its winters become shorter and milder, and its 
periods of hope and fruition longer and more 
delightful. 

If we heartily believe that this life is a prepara- 
tion for the life to come, and death a door through 
which we pass from a world of types and things 
transient, into a world of realities and things 



THE CHANGING SEASONS. 119 

permanent, and if we live lives in harmony with 
this belief, the advancing age of the body will not 
be painful to us. As we pass through the autumn 
of life, and feel its winter approaching, we shall 
not dwell upon the idea that our hands are losing 
their cunning and our feet their firmness of step ; 
that our siolit is becoming dim, and our ear 
forgetting to hear, and that we are sinking down- 
ward into the grave. Such thoughts belong to 
those who have built their houses upon the sand, 
and laid up their treasures upon earth. If they 
come to us we shall put them away as temptations 
from below, and we shall feel that our Heavenly 
Father is gently loosing the material bonds that 
connect us with this world, in order that we may 
turn our hearts towards the mansions He has pre- 
pared for us in the heavens. As our material eye 
becomes dim to the things of the earth, the spir- 
itual eye within it will learn to see more clearly 
the things which pertain to heaven ; and as our 
ear grows dull to earthly noises, it will listen more 
intently to the words of eternal life. All that we 
lose of the material will serve to quicken our sen- 
sibilities to the spiritual, and instead of wasting 
our thoughts in vain regrets for the earth which 



120 THE CHANGING SEASONS. 

we are leaving, we shall be looking forward in 
joyful hope to the heaven we are about to enter. 

It is a remark often made, that one would like 
to live so long; as the faculties remain bright and 
the health firm ; but these attributes being just 
those which prevent us from being willing to die, 
Providence kindly takes them from us, that, feel- 
ing the imperfections of the material body, we 
may become willing to put it off, and so come into 
the superior life of the spiritual body. 

The poet Waller beautifully expresses this truth 
in a single couplet : — 

" The soul's dark cottage, batter'd and decay'd, 
Lets in new light through chinks that time has made. 

The trouble is, that we are too prone to shiver 
and complain about the inclemencies that we feel 
through these chinks, instead of looking for the 
heavenly light that comes to us through them if 
we will but seek for it. 

My garden, with its withered flowers and bar- 
renness of fruit, is no longer a pleasant place to 
walk in for anything contained within its narrow 
limits, and I will not pretend that I can look with- 
out regret upon the havoc that the frost has made ; 
but I can certainly bear it with much more pa- 



THE CHANGING SEASONS. 121 

tience, and even with some degree of contentment, 
as I look beyond it and see what the falling of the 
leaves from the elms that surround me has reveal- 
ed. Through the bare but stately boughs I can 
trace the graceful outlines of the surrounding hills, 
rising one beyond another in the most charming 
variety, clad here and there with fine woods, or 
ornamented with trees, standing solitary or in 
groups, glowing with autumn colors, their bril- 
liancy softened into the most exquisite tenderness 
of hue by the delicate haze that fills the air and 
saves the eye from being pained and dazzled by 
excess of brightness. Beyond this I can trace the 
horizon where heaven seems to clasp hands with 
earth, and to say, " Come up hither." Over all 
bends the dome of the sky, the view of its hem- 
isphere now scarcely interrupted by the delicate 
tracery of the tree-tops, so that I can watch 
at will the motions of the clouds and of ' ' the 
greater and the lesser lights." 

I cannot but feel sorry that the season of flowers 
and fruits is departing ; but the joyous smiles with 
which it leaves us promise a speedy return ; and 
I should be unwilling to lose all this autumnal 
beauty, rich as it is in spiritual suggestions, even 
though I might have summer always. 



AUTUMN LEAYES. 



" Let the dead past bury its dead."— Longfellow. 




X. 

AUTUMN LEAVES. 



(J T |jpHE brightness of Autumn is gone, and the 



£UI1 fallen leaves, brown and sear, scattered 
everywhere as they rustle beneath our footsteps, 
remind us, either sadly or thoughfully, as the 
mind's tendency may be, of the beauty that has 
passed away. If we choose to take a sad view of 
life and nature, we can find apt illustration for our 
moody and morbid fantasies in the suggestions the 
withered leaves will furnish us ; and as we crush 
them under our feet, the sound they give forth will 
be mournful to us as a funeral bell, telling us only 
of death and desolation. 

All sorrowful views of the inevitable changes 
that Providence has ordained to take place in this 
world are, however, either mistaken or superficial ; 
and if we find ourselves saddened by them, we 
should seek to understand them more wisely, and 
(125) 



126 AUTUMN LEAVES. 

we shall then be very sure to find everywhere 
beauty instead of ashes. 

Leaves correspond to truths, and withered 
leaves to the truths that, belonging to the external 
memory, pass out from our immediate cognizance, 
but are still ours when we wish to recall them for 
some special purpose. 

Our thoughts are occupied every day by a suc- 
cession of truths bearing upon our duties, em- 
ployments, or amusements ; and these truths, for 
the most part, seem to be of little or no value ex- 
cepting for the moment ; yet they are all impor- 
tant to the moment. Small as they are, it is the 
constant repetition of the impressions received 
from them that makes up the whole external of 
our minds, clothing them as the leaves clothe the 
trees. They pass away from us day by day, and 
even hour by hour ; and to the superficial obser- 
ver the truths that occupied the thoughts yester- 
day are of as little consequence to-day as last 
year's leaves are to the trees in the greenness of a 
present summer. 

The cultivator finds that nothing nourishes the 
growth of plants so well as decayed leaves, and 
that each variety of plant is best nourished by its 
own decayed leaves. Herein we find a perfect 



AUTUMN LEAVES. 127 

correspondence between the plant and the human 
being. It is the accumulation of truths or facts 
filling the thoughts day by day that produces ex- 
perience, and it is our own personal experience 
that builds up our mental strength and gives the 
most perfect growth in wisdom. The thoughtful 
person is like a careful cultivator, who gathers up 
the fallen leaves and uses them to nourish his 
plants ; but the thoughtless person is like one who 
suffers the idle winds to blow away the leaves, or 
perchance sets fire to them. The one is con- 
stantly gathering into the garner of his experience 
truths taught him by the successes and even by 
the failures of to-day, whereby to guide his life 
to-morrow ; while the other, reflecting upon noth- 
ing, adds nothing to his mental stores, and taking 
no thought about the mistakes of to-day, re- 
peats them again to-morrow. 

The past is a beneficent teacher to us if we 
look to it thoughtfully, seeking to find instruction 
for the present and future, and never allowing 
ourselves to dwell upon its disappointments and its 
sorrows with morbid regret, or upon its successes 
with proud rejoicing. If we would gain true wis- 
dom from the past, we must study it, constantly 
bearing in mind that it was all overruled by 



128 AUTUMN LEAVES. 

Providence ; that it was not our unaided strength 
that gained the battles of life, or won its prizes ; 
and that it was no idle chance that disappointed 
our hopes, or took from us our treasures. 

Life is made up of a very few great events scat- 
tered among a multitude of small ones. From 
the small ones we may gather intelligence to guide 
us through the daily duties of our lives, and from 
the great ones we may attain wisdom that shall 
make our way plain in the darkest places through 
which we may be called to pass. 

In order that the experience of the past may 
form a healthful nutriment for the life of the pres- 
ent, we must look back upon it without wishing 
for its return, and with eyes not blinded by regret- 
ful tears. It is only when the past has become 
dead to us that it can help to make us live. 
While we strive to keep the past alive by clinging 
to its memory with sighs and tears, wishing we 
could make it return to us, and losing our con- 
sciousness of the present, so far as we can, by 
dwelling in the world of memory, the past can 
only nourish our morbid passions, and unfit us for 
every duty. When, on the contrary, we give up 
the past as something not to be mourned for or 
wished back again, because our Heavenly Father 



AUTUMN LEAVES. 129 

has placed it beyond our power, making it irre- 
vocable, and as it were dead, then it begins to give 
us life, and to nourish our souls by its very decay. 
Then we gather our dead leaves, not to weep over 
them, but to gain new life from them. 

It is a tendency of the merely natural mind to 
cling with fondness to the memory of the past, as 
if the present could not give us anything so desir- 
able as the pleasures and blessings we have already 
enjoyed. It believes the careless gayety of child- 
hood to be better than the developed usefulness 
and tranquil pleasures of mature life. It depre- 
ciates the manners and morals of the present day 
in comparison with those that prevailed formerly ; 
and rarely finds in a present blessing compensation 
for the loss of a former one. It esteems mourn- 
ing for the dead a sacred duty, and clothes itself 
in sable weeds, the livery of an insubordinate will, 
that help to keep up the delusion that God does 
not wisely number our days, and mercifully over- 
rule the issues of life. Just so far as we give way 
to these natural tendencies of the mind, we check 
its spiritual growth, because we put ourselves in 
direct opposition to the eternal law of progress 
which the Creator has ordained for everything that 
He has made. A never-resting movement is the 



130 AUTUMN LEAVES. 

tenure by which we hold our lives. If we pause 
anywhere our intelligence stagnates, our affections 
rust, our powers are dwarfed, and our faculties 
paralyzed. To desire to be always a child is to 
desire to be a mental dwarf. To hope to abide in 
any term of growth, or to enjoy always the self- 
same happiness, is to hope to place a bar beyond 
which our development shall not pass. To wish 
that our friends or ourselves might never die, is to 
wish that they ancj we may never know the highest 
culture, the purest happiness, the noblest useful- 
ness, of which humanity is capable. To talk of 
untimely death, of premature departure from this 
world, is to deny an overruling Providence, or to 
put our judgment above His. 

The leaf falls from the tree because the fyid of 
a future leaf swells beneath the end of its stem, 
and pushes it off from the bough. It has done its 
appointed work, and must make way for another 
that can perform the work that is yet to be done. 
The truths that clothe the mind as the leaves 
clothe the trees, forming the whole texture of the 
thoughts, change like the leaves if we make any 
mental growth. New relations in life, new objects 
of pursuit, new associates, new books, new vicis- 
situdes, everything in short that makes one day 



AUTUMN LEAVES. 131 

different from another, introduces new thoughts 
into the mind, and pushes out the old ones, and 
by these changes our minds grow, if they grow at 
all. Each time that the tree puts on a new cover- 
ing of leaves, a new ring is added to the wood of 
its stem, and its branches spread higher toward 
heaven. What the trees do thus involuntarily, 
they do, under Providence, for our instruction ; 
and if we accept the lesson they teach we shall 
pass through life's seasons striving to mourn as 
little as possible for the past, but so strengthened 
and quickened by its experience that our faith in 
the unslumbering love and unerring wisdom of our 
Heavenly Father will constantly become more 
firmly fixed, and our aspirations rise more ardently 
towards the heavenly mansions. 




THE USES OF GARDENING. 



^« 3 < >fr»^- 



The culture of plants, whether in-doors or out, affords a recrea- 
tion to the mind so innocent in itself, and so suggestive of wise 
thought in its relations to all other culture, that the refraining 
from it seems a neglect of privilege, if not of duty. 



V^fJUP 




XI. 



THE USES OF GARDENING. 




"OW that the earth is so thickly covered with 
13 snow that I can no longer go out into my 
garden, I try to continue something of my connec- 
tion with the vegetable world by having a few 
plants in the house. These are perhaps all the 
dearer to me that there are so few of them, and 
that they are so dependent on my care ; since now 
nature gives them only light, while water and heat 
must come to them by artificial means. When 
plants become members of the household they are 
brought into a nearer relation to us, and seem 
more like personal friends than when they are in 
the garden. In the abundance of summer foliage 
and flowers we do not think so much of individual 
beauty as of the universal luxuriance of nature. 
We gather bouquets at will, to adorn our rooms, 
and so soon as they begin to fade we throw them 
(135) 



136 THE USES OF GARDENING. 

away with little remorse or regret ; for there are 
plenty more to supply their place. In the winter, 
with perhaps only a dozen plants, every leaf be- 
comes a personal acquaintance, and a blossom is 
an intimate friend, watched over with loving inter- 
est from the time the tiny bud is first discovered 
till the faded petals droop and die. 

However keenly we may enjoy the abounding 
beauty that surrounds us in the prosperity of sum- 
mer, there is an interior delight in the pleasures 
we receive from nature in the adversity of winter, 
that often touches the soul far more deeply. Un- 
interrupted prosperity and unlimited affluence too 
often produce but an imperfect growth of the 
mind, because it enjoys them without reflection. 
One pleasure succeeds another too rapidly to leave 
space for thought between them. The mind grows 
under their influence like a fruit-tree planted in 
fine soil, but which has never been pruned. There 
will probably be a luxuriant growth of wood and 
foliage, but few blossoms and still fewer fruits. If 
nature gives us less to enjoy in winter than in 
summer, she allows us more time to follow out 
her suggestions ; and if we do so faithfully, we 
shall find that many of the thoughts we gain from 
her, like many of the best sorts of pears and 



THE USES OF GARDENING. 137 

apples, ripen only in the house. The household 
is a garden where human development goes on in 
a way corresponding to the growth of the animal 
and the vegetable world; and it is through the 
various relations the household involves, that we 
best learn to apply to life the truths we gather in 
our studies out of doors. 

Most persons suppose that gardening, as a 
pleasure, is a merely optional thing, and not a 
question with which conscience has anything to 
do ; but there is a right and a wrong to most 
questions, and to me it seems that not to have a 
garden, where it is practicable, and not to have 
plants in the house, which is almost always prac- 
ticable, is neglecting to make use of a very impor- 
tant means of mental and moral culture. 

We may receive the doctrines that Swedenborg 
has unfolded in relation to the correspondences of 
the vegetable kingdom in a general way, by simply 
reading about them ; but when we study -them by 
the actual observation of plants, we gain a knowl- 
edge of them incomparably more clear and vivid 
than abstract study can give. If a chemist or 
other student of natural science should confine 
himself to books, refusing to make use of a labor- 
atory, or to examine specimens of the animal, 



138 THE USES OF GARDENING. 

vegetable, or mineral kingdoms about which he 
studied, affirming that he could learn just as well 
from books, every one conversant with such sub- 
jects would exclaim at his folly. Is it not a folly 
much more to be shunned, when one who believes 
in the science of correspondences, neglects the 
observation of natural objects offered so freely to 
him by the beneficent Creator ? It is nearly twenty 
years since I became a reader of Swedenborg, and 
it is only two years that I have had a garden ; but 
I think I do not exaggerate when I say that in 
these two years, through the aid my garden has 
given me, I have learned more about correspon- 
dences than in the whole preceding eighteen. 

Not long before I had a garden of my own, I 
remarked to an enthusiastic horticulturist, who 
was talking to me of his fruits and flowers, " You 
must find great pleasure in your garden." " Not 
pleasure only," said he, "but culture also.'* I 
did not comprehend at that time what he meant, 
and was surprised at his reply. I had not, how- 
ever, enjoyed my own garden a month before my 
eyes began to open, for I found that my garden 
was educating me in the true sense of the word ; 
leading out my faculties by suggesting new trains 
of thought, and illustrating old and new thoughts 



THE USES OF GARDENING. 139 

by correspondences so exquisite, that I felt intro- 
duced through them into a new world. 

One may love flowers, and enjoy them as they 
grow under the care of other hands ; but plants 
are like children ; they tell their secrets only to 
those who show their love by doing something for 
them ; and the more one does, so it be done for 
love, the more secrets one hears and sees. 

Many suppose that things may be appreciated 
by contemplation, apart from action ; but when 
they experiment actively in these same things, 
their senses are opened, and they discover that 
hitherto they have had eyes but saw not, ears but 
heard not. Abstract knowledge is automatic and 
external, while practical knowledge is living and 
internal. What we learn practically becomes a 
part of ourselves, and results in something that 
remains with us forever. 

Thus has it been with my garden. I began it 
merely as an amusement, but found it a true 
recreation. I began thinking only of cultivating 
it; and, to my surprise, found it immediately 
began to cultivate me. I hoped to find bodily 
health from working in it, and found mental health 
far more. 

There has always been a belief in the popular 



140 THE USES OF GARDENING. 

mind that the odor of freshly cultivated earth pos- 
sessed a health-giving power, and feeble children 
are thought to be invigorated by " playing in the 
dirt." I am convinced that this popular opinion 
is no fallacy, for my own experience has proved to 
me that the breath of our mother earth is a tonic 
of surprising power. 

It was a fable of the Greek Mythology, that 
when Antaeus, the son of Earth and Ocean, con- 
tended with an enemy, as often as he was thrown 
upon the ground, his mother gave him strength to 
renew the combat until he was victorious. Since 
I have become intimate with mother Earth, and 
have experienced her renovating power, I have 
felt as though the Greeks symbolized the hygienic 
force of the soil in the fable, and that Antaeus was 
but a type of all of us who wrestle in the garden 
and in the field to escape from the thrall of in- 
validism. I have found health, recreation, and 
mental culture in my garden ; and I write my 
experiences in the hope that it may draw others to 
seek the same blessings from the same source. I 
will not promise them to any one save upon con- 
dition that they are sought lovingly, as a child 
goes to its mother for aid. I believe the earth is 
a beneficent mother to those who go to her with a 



THE USES OF GAKDENING. 141 

truly filial feeling ; but if you have no love for her, 
— if no answering emotion rises in your breast 
when she clothes herself in her beautiful garments, 
and offers you her bounty of flowers and fruits, I 
will promise you nothing for all the toil you may 
expend. If you have lost your health, you must 
go to the druggist for help, for your heart is too 
cold and your brain too heavy to be permeated by 
the soft, life-giving breath that renews the being 
of every true child of Earth, when he turns lov- 
ingly towards his mother. 

Everything that is high in the creation contains 
within itself everything that is lower ; we are all 
that is below us and something more, and the 
something more is what gives us our distinctive 
individuality. 

We are born children of the Earth, and we do 
not cease to be such when we become spiritualized. 
The external of our spirit draws its nutriment 
from the external world, and we do not leave it 
behind us as we live more in the internal ; but we 
fill it with a higher life. Thus our enjoyment of 
everything beautiful becomes indefinitely heightened 
in proportion as our affections and thoughts be- 
come purified and elevated ; and the more brightly 
light comes down to us from heaven, the more 



142 THE USES OF GARDENING. 

distinctly are we able to read the book of nature, 
and to perceive that it was written by the hand of 
God. Irreverent minds are confirmed in their in- 
difference to spiritual things by the study of nature. 
They look down till they lose the power of looking 
up ; and sometimes dwell upon the wonders of 
creation till they deny a Creator ; but the reverent 
eye scans the heavens all the more steadfastly if 
the feet are planted firmly upon the earth ; and 
finds a new incentive to worship in every fact of 
science and every form of nature. 

Formerly I cared little for house-plants ; but now 
I feel as though they were indispensable, and that 
I must have a little garden in the house, when the 
severity of the season compels me to desert the 
garden out of doors. All the phases of plant- 
growth correspond perfectly with those of the 
mind ; and the more carefully we watch them, the 
better are we able to understand the development 
of the mental powers, and to gain true ideas in 
relation to the training of our own faculties, and 
the directing of other minds over whom our influ- 
ence may extend. 

A mother would find an hour a day spent 
among her flowers, a very useful preparation for 
the hours she spends with her children. It is a 



THE USES OF GARDENING. 143 

great mistake, too often made by mothers, that 
hours spent apart from the cares in which their 
families involve them are stolen hours, to which 
they have scarce a right. Apart from the instruc- 
tion to be derived from the tending of plants, the 
relaxation of the mind from care past, and its re- 
creation for care to come, renew the life of the 
mind, and through that the life of the body ; so 
that more would be accomplished in the hours that 
are left, than if that one had not been taken from 
them. Do not, then, if you are a mother with 
many cares, deny yourself the pleasure and benefit 
of plants, because you think you have not time for 
them. 

You may as well forbid your children to take 
advantage of the recess at school, hoping that they 
will learn more from studying all the time they 
are at school, as to deny yourself the recess from 
care in your long days at home, supposing that 
you can accomplish more by uninterrupted effort. 
The child can learn more when he has a proper 
recess during his school hours, and the mother can 
do more, with less effort and less fatigue, if she 
too has a recess from her cares. A little time 
spent with your plants each day, will unbend your 
mind from the strain perpetual care brings upon 



144 THE USES OF GARDENING. 

it, and will rest your eyes, which are so apt to be 
overtasked; and by giving a new turn to your 
thoughts, for a little while, will reanimate you to 
return to your family duties. You will come back 
to your work with new alacrity, as the child 
comes into the house, from his play, all alive and 
joyous. 

The early passing away of youth in the women 
of America has long been observed, and various 
causes have been assigned for it. I am convinced 
that it is the want of relaxation from family cares. 
Whenever I have observed a woman who retains 
her youthful appearance, I have always found she 
had some special taste that drew her away from 
her cares. It might be music, or painting, or 
reading; but always something apart from the 
daily requirements of her life. She, perhaps, in- 
dulged her taste by stealth, and doubting if she 
were right in doing so ; but the wrong is to refrain 
from such indulgence. Mind and body suffer 
alike for lack of it, and the dwelling place be- 
comes, through unremitted toil, a weary house of 
bondage, instead of a free and happy home. 



THE HOUSEHOLD GARDEN. 



" Home is the source, channel, issue, of all those principles and 
powers which bless earth and promise immortality. The inmost 
of the circles which spread out widening, and, amidst change, 
still enduring, into societies, nations, churches, and whatever 
forms humanity may receive."— T. T. Stone. 



~<JL9r»~ 




XII. 

THE HOUSEHOLD GAEDEN. 

(|F|fpHE correspondence existing between the 
iyjJ-§ mind of man and the forms and operations 
of the natural world, is frequently referred to in 
the Scriptures. The righteous man is compared 
to ' ' a tree planted by the rivers of water." The obe- 
dient are encouraged with the promise that ' ' their 
soul shall be as a watered garden." The sowing 
of seed, the springing up of the blade, the pro- 
duction of fruit, are made to illustrate the plant- 
ing of truth in the mind and the results that come 
from it, according to the quality of the mind in 
which it is planted. The garden may be con- 
sidered as representing a society of human beings, 
in which each plant represents an individual ; or it 
may be looked upon as one man, the earth of it 
corresponding to the mind, and the various plants 
representing its different traits. In either case the 
(147) 



148 THE HOUSEHOLD GARDEN. 

correspondence is perfect, as the Scriptures testify. 
The institution of a society for any purpose is thus 
the planting of a garden, and in order that it may 
succeed it must be well chosen as to soil, and then 
it must be watered by heavenly truth, and warmed 
by heavenly love. If a society is ineffectual for 
the purposes for which it was organized, it is be- 
cause it is deficient in one or more of these re- 
quisites. It looks perhaps to self for light, in- 
stead of turning to the Lord : and is warmed by 
hatred for evil, rather than by love for goodness. 

Of all the social gardens with which the earth 
is planted, none is so important in its results to 
the whole fabric of society, none so powerful in its 
influence upon individual life, as the household. 
The political, the moral, and the religious life of a 
nation depend upon the influences that gather 
round the homesteads of its people. The seeds 
there sown will spring up into plants and trees 
that will be transplanted into larger spheres, to 
grow into forms of beauty and of use, bearing 
flowers and fruits that shall minister to the wants 
and to the pleasures of all who surround them ; or 
else into perverted and hateful deformities, ready 
to poison the atmosphere and blast the touch, 
wherever their influence may be borne. 



THE HOUSEHOLD GARDEX. 149 

The household is the only social garden in which 
every human being has a personal interest ; and 
this fact alone, is sufficient to prove that it is the 
most important of them all. 

The salvation of the souls of men is the first 
object in the Providence of God ; and as the set- 
tins: of human beings in families is a universal 
arrangement of His Providence, it seems a natural 
inference that the influences coming to the soul 
through the family relations are those which most 
powerfully effect its growth and development. 

We cannot look around us without being forced 
to acknowledge that a large proportion of families 
are organized in such a way, that no true develop- 
ment of the soul is effected through their means. 
This want of success is not always the result of 
depravity.. Many earnestly desire and strive to 
bring up their children wisely, and to fulfil all the 
family relations as they should ; and yet they fail. 
Many more take no proper thought about their 
duties ; but go on at random, satisfied if they do 
about as well as their neighbors, and thinking it no 
fault of theirs when their children disappoint their 
hopes. The variety of mistaken culture every 
social circle affords is so painful, that sometimes 
those who are childless are tempted to con^ratu- 



150 THE HOUSEHOLD GARDEN, 

late themselves ; since they thereby escape a re- 
sponsibility which so few are able to bear with" 
success. 

It is commonly believed that moral science is 
not exact and positive, like the sciences that deal 
with material objects ; and that cause and effect do 
not cling together in human development as in the 
growth of plants and animals. If I assert the 
contrary belief, it may be brought against me that 
not having had personal experience in training a 
family, my opinion is of little value. Still the 
subject is one that has deeply interested me all my 
life, and the very fact of having no family of my 
own has left me time and opportunity to extend 
my observations over a wider circle of the families 
of other people ; so that I build my theories upon 
a foundation of facts far more numerous than if I 
had been experimenting at home. 

My leading theory is briefly this. The parents 
of every family control the characters of their 
children with a power corresponding to that which 
a cultivator of the soil exercises over his farm or 
his garden ; and the limitations of this power are 
in like manner corresponding. 

Humanity is nowhere omnipotent. "Paul may 
plant, and Apollos may water ; but it is God who 



THE HOUSEHOLD GARDEN. 151 

giveth the increase." God works constantly in 
two ways, directly and indirectly : through human 
means and overruling human means. The gar- 
dener is not certain of success in all his efforts, let 
him work diligently and wisely as he can. Some 
of his plants will die, and some of them will repay 
his toil but meagrely ; still, taking all things to- 
gether, his reward is, on the whole, proportionate 
with his efforts. 

A gardener who wishes to excel in his profession 
must make a study of the science of gardening, 
and then he must learn the art of applying that 
science. The scientific and the practical must ever 
go hand in hand, in order to attain to excellence. 
So the parent who would really educate a child 
must have a definite knowledge of what he is aim- 
ing at ; and then he must pursue his object by 
means adapted to the end to be attained. 

When two persons unite their destinies for life 
with the same kind of thoughtlessness that they 
would take partners for a cotillon, and then bring 
up children as heedlessly as if they were not re- 
sponsible beings, they have as much right to com- 
plain of their want of success, as a gardener who 
buys a lot of land without seeing it, and cultivates 
it only in the night. 



152 THE HOUSEHOLD GAEDEN. 

Plants sown at random, and children brought 
up without care, sometimes turn out well, because 
other influences reach them, and do for them what 
their natural protectors failed of doing ; but the 
possibility of such a result does not in the least 
diminish the responsibility of those to whom the 
duty of training rightly belongs. The sin of their 
neglect hangs as heavily about their necks as if it 
resulted in the failure it deserved. 

Humanity loves to sit at ease, and to find ex- 
cuses for putting off, or setting aside, its duties. 
Those who yield to their indolent tendencies have 
no right to complain that life with them is a failure, 
and that their children bring their gray hairs in 
sorrow to the grave : but to those who look life, 
with all its responsibilities, calmly in the face ; who 
feel the Divine Providence always and everywhere 
surrounding them ; who seek to know the law of 
the Lord that they may do and teach it, ascribing 
the power and glory always to the Lord, failure is 
almost impossible. 

The majority of parents begin their duties with 
no fixed principles, with little knowledge of their 
own hearts, and still less of that most delicate of 
all organizations, the heart of a little child. Not 
accustomed to the control of their own evil dis- 



THE HOUSEHOLD GARDEN. 153 

positions, they begin by indulging the evil disposi- 
tions of their child, until they clash with their 
own ; and then, mistaking violence for power, 
they resort to angry words or blows to exorcise 
the evil spirits their own neglect has permitted to 
take possession of their child. They rely on the 
evil spirits that infest themselves to cast out those 
that infest their children. Then the household be- 
comes a field of battle, in which anger and violence 
are the overruling powers, in which there is no- 
thing of confidence on either side ; in which the 
child grows up cunning, deceitful, and false ; and 
the parents, simply because they reap the natural 
harvest of the seed they sowed, deny that children 
are a blessing, as they sink morosely into the old 
age that feels itself in the way of all that is young, 
because it has no sympathy with the perennial 
pleasures of innocence. 

Another class of parents, of a naturally gentle 
disposition, by their devotion to their children 
pamper their selfishness until they develop charac- 
ters the direct opposite of their own. Society 
looks on and says : " Here is a mother who has 
given up all social pleasures to take the whole care 
of her children upon herself, and her sons are 
growing up dissipated, and worthless, and her 



154: THE HOUSEHOLD GARDEN. 

daughters thinking of nothing but dress and dis- 
play. What has she gained by all this self-sacri- 
fice ? " The truth seems to me to be that she has 
gained just what she had a right to expect. Her 
love for her children was a mere natural impulse. 
She devoted herself to them because she loved 
them with her whole heart and soul and mind and 
strength ; as if they were her very own, and not 
recollecting that they were confided to her care by 
one who bids us love Him first, and make His 
Word the law of our lives. Parental affection is 
but a blind guide when it walks by its own insight ; 
and is very sure to lead the way into tangled 
woods, and bewildering mazes that end in destruc- 
tion. 

Parental love, when viewed superficially, seems 
more free than any other from the taint of selfish- 
ness. During infancy and early childhood, parents 
often seem to live only for ministering to the wants 
and pleasures of their offspring ; but even here 
selfishness may be the life of all this devotion. 
The child is but a part, an expansion of self; and 
just as parents love themselves so they love their 
children. Wilful, self-indulgent parents love to 
pamper the wilfulness and self-indulgence of their 
children ; vain parents inflate the vanity of their 



THE HOUSEHOLD GAKDEN. 155 

children ; worldly parents train their children to 
worldliness ; and so on through the whole cata- 
logue of vices. There is no more virtue in such 
love than in that of the pickpocket who teaches his 
child to steal ; or the drunkard who pets his child 
with a taste of his drams. The only difference is, 
that one parent teaches vulgar vices, while the 
other teaches the vices of refined society. 

When the child becomes of an age to manifest 
its own thoughts and desires independently of the 
parent, the difficulty that the parent often feels in 
yielding the child its just freedom, in acknowledg- 
ing the liberty that belongs to it as a child of God, 
— a liberty that should not be denied it, when it 
becomes of an age to judge for itself, because then 
it becomes accountable to an authority higher than 
that of the earthly parent, — proves the selfishness 
that may lie hidden within even a mother's de- 
votion. 

The loves of dominion and of possession too 
often give a zest to parental love. We love that 
which is ductile in our hands, that which yields it- 
self to our power ; and we love that which belongs 
to ourselves because it is in reality a part of self. 

When the loves of self and of the world rule in 
the heart of the parents, the natural products of 



156 THE HOUSEHOLD GARDEN. 

the household garden are offensive flowers and bit- 
ter fruits ; but where love to the Lord rules su- 
premely, and His Word is the household law, 
home becomes an Eden, a genuine garden of God, 
wherein no leaf shall wither and no fruit shall 
blast. 




HOME VIRTUES. 



" To the child, the parent stands as the embodied reason, the 
form of truth and virtue, the highest type of the Supreme Being." 

T.T.Stone. 




XIII. 



HOME VIRTUES. 



^^^HE natural affections, such as conjugal, 
|^j|^| parental, filial, and fraternal love, and the 
love of home, which would seem to bind all the 
others into a single sheaf of household virtues, are 
supposed by many persons to be inherently and of 
necessity pure and holy. Yet every one of these 
affections may be only modifications of the love of 
self. Self-love clings, like the Pilgrim's burden, 
to every trait of our nature ; and can be cast off 
only at the foot of the cross. Natural affection, 
until it has been spiritualized by regeneration, is a 
body without a soul, the form of love without its 
immortal essence. 

We may test the quality of any of our affec- 
tions, by honestly answering such questions as the 
following : Does it make us love to minister to 
others, or demand that others should minister to 
(159) 



160 HOME VIRTUES. 

us ? Do we seek our own happiness in loving, or 
the happiness of the person we love ? Do we love 
to be at home, because there we can rule, and fret, 
and find fault without restraint, and devote our- 
selves to our own pleasure ; or because there we 
reciprocate all kindly affections, and help to fill 
out the harmony of a happy household ? 

We are all prone to love those who flatter our 
vanity, who pet our foibles and weaknesses, who 
look with an indulgent eye upon our vices, or who 
minister to our comfort ; and among our family 
relatives, we usually find more of all this than in 
any other social circle. We love to be ministered 
to, and to exercise selfishness in many ways, and 
a very ardent love of home may dwell in our 
hearts, because there we are ministered to more 
than elsewhere — because there we can be more 
selfish than anywhere else. 

If the love of dominion and of selfish indulg- 
ence were put away from the human heart, a 
home would be more delightful from containing a 
numerous family, and involving every variety 
of relationship ; because the various faculties of 
the heart would be called into more complete ac- 
tivity, and a fuller and higher life attained, than is 
possible in a small home circle. The affections 



HOME VIRTUES. 161 

lose their pliancy and expansiveness by being con- 
fined within narrow limits ; and it is more difficult 
to avoid becoming more indulgent towards our- 
selves, and less so towards others, in a small 
household, where there are few interests, than in 
a large one, where there are many. 

A happy home, like heaven, is a place where 
each individual is seeking to make others happy. 
There is no class of persons who find so little hap- 
piness as those who seek it directly, through self- 
indulgence of any kind ; no matter how innocent 
the mode of indulgence may be. Self-forgetful- 
ness is the first, and a desire to benefit others the 
second, requisite in a happy life. AYe must think 
of ourselves in order to cultivate our powers 
of usefulness, our moral and intellectual faculties, 
and to keep our bodies in a state of health, that 
they may may be able to serve the mind ; and we 
shall find happiness in such thoughts of ourselves ; 
but the moment we begin to form plans of life that 
have our own individual happiness as means and 
end, we are taking the most direct method of mak- 
ing ourselves miserable. Just so far as the mem- 
bers of a household seek their happiness in making 
others happy, home becomes a correspondence 
of heaven ; and just so far as they seek their own 

11 



162 HOME VIRTUES. 

individual happiness without regard, or in oppo- 
sition to, the happiness of the rest, home becomes 
a correspondence of hell. 

Parents who would make home a heavenly 
abode, must bear in mind that they are to the 
little child what the Heavenly Father is to them- 
selves. A little child's only idea of God is based 
upon the ideas of love, wisdom, and power that 
he receives from the daily life of his father and 
mother. A child who sees his parents religiously 
self-controlled, and just and affectionate, will be 
sure to respect and love and obey them, and the 
filial virtue they arouse in his mind will form a 
generous soil, on which piety and reverent obedi- 
ence to God will spring up and grow until they 
overshadow the whole being. But if the child is 
so unfortunate as to see his parents without self- 
control ; if they indulge or thwart his wishes in 
accordance with the mood of their own tempers, 
and without regard to propriety and justice; if 
they deny him at first, and then yield to his teas- 
ing importunities ; if they tell him to do right, and 
yet permit him to do wrong ; if they pet him when 
they feel good-natured, and scold him when they 
feel cross, it is impossible that he should have any 
feeling of true respect for them. He may love 



HOME VIRTUES. 163 

tliem fitfully, as they love him ; and he will obey 
them when he cannot help it ; and all this prepares 
him to think of God as an arbitrary being, very 
fearful and terrible, and altogether removed from 
the plane of his love. 

A little child is almost intuitively pious, if the 
least help is given him by those who are about 
him ; for the angels that continually behold the 
face of the Heavenly Father, are lending all their 
influence to draw his heart upward ; and if his 
earthly guardians would but cooperate with his 
heavenly ones, his spiritual growth would be as 
certain and as easy as his material growth. His 
course would not be steadily upward, because the 
soul has its natural and inherited diseases like 
the body ; and these will, from time to time, be 
brought out by temptation, as the physical dis- 
eases incident to childhood are developed by favor- 
ing circumstances ; but these would all be miti- 
gated by a previously wise training, and overcome 
by wise treatment, with much more success in the 
mental education than in the physical ; because 
the will has far more power to modify the traits of 
the mind than of the body. In order to develop 
true filial respect in the minds of children, parents 
must first have developed a true a^d childlike 



164 HCME VIRTUES. 

piety in themselves. They must recognize their 
own responsibility to their Heavenly Father before 
they can see clearly to direct the hearts of the 
little beings whom He has intrusted to their care. 
The child has no reason or conscience of its own ; 
and they must be reason and conscience for him. 

Parental authority, during the first few years of 
the child's life, should be entirely arbitrary. Rea- 
son and conscience develop slowly in a child, 
through instruction and training. Until they are 
developed he should be made implicitly obedient 
to the reason and conscience of his parents. To 
tell a child that an act is foolish or wrong, and 
then to let him do it, is throwing a responsibility 
from the parent, who ought to bear it, upon the 
child, who is too weak to bear it. Every time 
this is done the child is confirmed in indifference 
to wrong, and in contempt of parental authority. 
If the parent has too little self-control to enforce 
obedience in a child, it is much better to let him 
alone entirely than to attempt to throw off the re- 
sponsibility which belongs entirely to the parent. 
The selfish weakness that attempts to quiet its 
own conscience, by merely telling a child it is 
wrong to do anything, and then permitting him to 
do it, is just* as reprehensible as acknowledging a 



HOME VIRTUES. 165 

thing to be wrong and then doing it one's self. 
There are persons who seem to think it mitigates 
the sin of an evil act, if one confesses it to be 
WTong; but to sin in the face of conviction is 
something that admits of no palliation. If you 
have so little moral strength that you will not en- 
force obedience in your child, at least have the 
forbearance to let him sin ignorantly. Do not 
confirm him in disobedience towards yourself, and 
in indifference to right and wrong, by laying bur- 
dens of responsibility upon his shoulders that he 
is wholly unable to bear. Your child cannot ap- 
preciate the consequences of a wrong action, 
because he has had almost no experience or obser- 
vation of life ; you know what the consequences 
are, and it is your duty to shield him from them 
by preventing him from doing wrong. We, who 
are grown men and women, all know how hard it 
is to resist the evil desires of our own hearts, 
although we can measure the consequences of in- 
dulging them so fully ; and yet we wonder that a 
little child is not ready to put away his evil desires 
the moment we tell him they are wrong. His 
passions about little things are just as hard for him 
to resist as our greater passions about greater 
things ; while his ignorance of consequences is 



166 HOME VIRTUES. 

almost total. He needs every aid we can give 
him to prevent Ms little feet from stumbling over 
the pebbles in his pathway, that to our greater 
strength are scarcely noticeable. We must not 
think we have done our duty, because we have 
told him of the danger. It is for us to hold him 
up, till he can walk safely by his own strength ; 
to restrain him, till by degrees he learns to 
restrain himself; to guide him till he has learned 
all we can teach him of the right way. 

Simple obedience is the only virtue a little child 
can practise, and it is the foundation of every 
other virtue. The child should be trained to it in 
the very first year of its existence ; with all possi- 
ble tenderness, but with equal firmness. Every 
month that this training is put off its difficulty in- 
creases ; and lost time and opportunity are two 
things that can never be recovered. Be very 
careful that you are right in what you require of 
your child, and then bear in mind that just in the 
degree it is right, you will be wrong if you do not 
enforce obedience in him. 

It is not always easy to know exactly what is 
right, and how much one should require of a little 
child. The more one lives a life of childlike 
obedience to the Heavenly Father, the better one 



HOME VIRTUES. 167 

understands what to ask of. one's child ; and to do 
this, one must keep as near Him as possible, 
through prayer and study of His Word. He is 
nearer to the parent than the parent, is to the 
child ; and if the heart is opened to Him, he will 
teach it " wondrous things out of His law." 




PARENTAL DUTY. 



"Remember how sacred childhood is; no ground so holy, no. 
temple so reverent : God is within. Far off from the hallowed 
scene, let profaneness, irreverence, unkindness, pass and disap- 
pear."— T. T. Stone. 



~*Slffr~ 




XIV. 



PARENTAL DUTY. 



|3ffel HAVE said that parental government should 
^HlH at first be entirely arbitrary. How long it 
should continue so must depend upon the rapidity 
with which the mental powers of the child unfold 
themselves. If you attempt to reason with a 
child, in order to convince his understanding of the 
difference between right and wrong, before he is 
old enough to appreciate what you say, you will 
confuse and worry him if he is of a mild disposi- 
tion, and you will confuse and irritate him if he is 
combative. In neither case have you made obe- 
dience easier to him or control easier to yourself. 
You must judge of the use of your reasoning by 
the effect it produces, and not be impatient to see 
your child a man in comprehension, while he is 
scarcely more than an infant in years. Very early 
development of conscience or reason in a child is 
(171) 



172 PARENTAL DUTY. 

almost always the result of a diseased brain ; and 
should never be sought for nor encouraged. The 
memoirs of pious little children, so often found in 
juvenile libraries, would be far more appropriate in 
the library of the medical student ; for they illus- 
trate a peculiar form of disease, and not a healthy 
growth. 

If your child at seven years of age is affec- 
tionate and obedient, you should be content with 
him, though he does not accurately reason about 
right and wrong. Affection and obedience will go 
hand in hand with the child, if the power you have 
exercised over him has been truly parental. If 
you find him fearful towards you, seeking to avoid 
you in his pursuits, and silent and constrained in 
your presence, you have made a mistake some- 
where. You have exercised too much power or 
too little affection, or you have not sympathized 
enough in his pursuits and pleasures ; or perhaps 
you have laughed at him, which, to a sensitive 
child, is of all hard things the hardest to bear. 
You may be content with your child if he is simply 
obedient, but do not be content with yourself un- 
less he is affectionate also. If he loves you as a 
companion in his walks and his talks and his 
sports, and yet is obedient to you when you do 



PAKENTAL DUTY. 173 

not indulge him in his wishes, then it is well with 
the child and with you also. 

Different children require very different modes 
of training. In the vegetable world, not only do 
different species of plants require different modes 
of treatment, but even different varieties of the 
same species. What will be entirely favorable to 
one kind of apple or pear, will be entirely destruc- 
tive to another. So with children in the same 
family ; one needs to be encouraged, and another 
to be restrained ; one needs protection, while 
another is as well or better without it ; some are 
discouraged by opposition, while to others it is 
exciting; and so on with endless variety. To 
do justice to a family of children, much thought 
must be given to their peculiarities. The father 
and mother must not feel that when they have 
provided for the material wants of the children, 
and sent them to school, thev have done what is 
most important. Careful and troubled about the 
many things that constitute the comfort of life 
they may have been, but there is one thing abso- 
lutely needful; and if they would choose the 
better part they must not exhaust all their strength 
and thought in providing for that which belongs 
only to this world. 



174 PARENTAL DUTY. 

Children are not gifts to be held as your per- 
sonal property, and to do with as you please. 
You hold them simply in trust from the Lord ; 
and you will have presently to account to Him for 
the care you have taken of them. He is saying 
to you in His Holy Word now, just as authorita- 
tively as He said to the disciples when He walked 
openly in Judea : ' ' Suffer little children to come 
unto me." Are you leading them to Him, or are 
you shutting them out from Him ? You are doing 
one of these things, for no parental influence is 
negative. 

If the father of a family looks upon making 
money as the paramount duty of his life, and the 
mother puts keeping the house and clothing the 
children above all other duties, the lives of both 
are perpetually forbidding the little children to 
come near the Lord. Most persons are obliged to 
spend their days in work for the support and com- 
fort of the body, and industry is one of the great- 
est virtues ; but this does not make it needful that 
the mind should be absorbed in work to the exclu- 
sion of everything else. Such a life is slavery of 
the basest kind, because self-assumed ; and the 
more wealth that is accumulated by such labor, 
the more degrading becomes the bondage. 



PARENTAL DUTY. 175 

Some of the finest examples of parental educa- 
tion I have ever seen have been among persons 
who were compelled by poverty to lives of con- 
stant labor ; and no class of human beings afford 
examples more numerous or more reprehensible of 
parental neglect, than those whose wealth places 
them beyond the necessity of effort. 

Perhaps I can best illustrate the ideas I wish to 
present by examples. There was once a family in 
the circle of my acquaintance, containing many 
children, the father and mother of whom, begin- 
ning in narrow circumstances, had arrived at a 
somewhat advanced age, their children grown up 
around them, and property enough laid by for an 
easy independence. Both parents had been inde- 
fatigably industrious, the one in his calling, the 
other in her household ; but their industry had 
limited itself, almost entirely, to life in its relations 
with this world. The mother had begun life with 
religious impressions and feelings, but the cares of 
this world overcame them, and choked them up. 
The children grew up indifferent to spiritual things, 
and with passions uncontrolled by principle. I 
was more than once present in this family when 
the most painful exhibitions were made of ill-tem- 
per and irreverence ; but on one such occasion the 



176 PARENTAL DUTY. 

mother turned to me, with tears in her eyes, and 
said, " I have lived a life of toil and care for my 
family, and I felt at the time that I was doing as 
I ought ; but now, in my old age, my children 
prove to me that I have been unfaithful to my 
highest duty." What a conviction to carry to 
one's grave ! Never, in the whole course of my 
life, have I seen physical poverty or suffering that 
seemed to me so pitiful as the spiritual destitution 
and grief of that mother. 

Another example will ever remain green in my 
memory, of the mother of a large family of 
young children, left a widow, and entirely desti- 
tute. She was a woman of profound religious 
principle, and she took up her cross and bore it 
steadfastly. Her children saw that she governed 
herself and them from the highest and purest mo- 
tives, and they followed as she led the way. A 
life of patient industry still left her time to incul- 
cate wise principles in the hearts of her children, 
and they remained faithful to them. No black 
sheep marred the beauty of her fold. She fed 
the lambs intrusted to her care, remembering that 
they belonged to the Lord ; and the best success 
has attended them thus far through life. 

Such examples are not rare or peculiar. They 



PARENTAL DUTY. 177 

are types of the two great classes into which hu- 
manity is divided. The one sees this world only, 
and lives only for the favors and rewards that this 
world can give. The other is ever looking through 
and beyond the things of this world, and valuing 
them as leading to something higher, something 
eternal. I do not mean to say that one class is 
entirely worldly-minded, and the other entirely 
heavenly-minded ; for absolute perfection or de- 
pravity does not belong to this world. What I 
mean is, that in every human being there is a cen- 
tral and supreme love that dominates over all the 
other affections, giving them an upward or a down- 
ward tendency, according as it aspires to heaven 
or clings to this world. In the social relations of 
life the character of this central love is not usually 
distinctly shown ; but in the freedom of home it 
appears much more clearly, and it acts upon the 
impressible minds of children with very great 
power. Every time a child perceives that its 
parents do things to please society, or refrain from 
doing things through fear of society, he takes a 
lesson from them in worldly servility ; and every 
time he perceives that they do things because they 
are right, or abstain from doing things because 



178 PARENTAL DUTY. 

they are wrong, lie takes a lesson in Christian 
freedom. 

It is no uncommon thing for a child to be more 
severely scolded or punished for offending against 
manners than against morals. The parent is mor- 
tified and angry at the rudeness or awkwardness 
of a child, but only moderately sorry if he lies. 
The child soon learns to look upon rudeness as a 
greater offence than lying, and acts accordingly. 
In very little children lying is sometimes even 
laughed at as being very funny, or as showing 
great brightness. As the child grows older, and 
becomes confirmed in the habit, the parents begin 
to wonder at his depravity, and finally set it down 
as a general rule that all children are liars. Lying 
is no doubt a fearfully common vice ; but so far as 
my observation has gone, it is much more com- 
mon with grown people than with children. The 
difference between the true and the false is one of 
the earliest distinctions a child can appreciate, and 
the parent cannot be too careful in teaching him 
to speak the truth, both by example and precept. 
If a child finds that his parents are faithful in 
keeping their promises to him, and that they never 
deceive him in any way, he will respect the truth 
in them; and if he sees that falsehood always 



PARENTAL DUTY. 179 

grieves and troubles them, he will be sure to avoid 
it. He should be taught that it is a sin against 
God to tell a lie, and therefore an act to be very 
sorry for. If parents are angry or violent towards 
a child, they destroy their moral power over him, 
and he looks upon what he has done as merely an 
offence against them. If they are impressed with 
a true feeling of reverence for God's law, they will 
not be angry when their child offends against it, 
but sorry ; and their sorrow will awaken a true 
feeling of penitence in the child, which will make 
him strive to abstain from a repetition of his 
offence, with far more earnestness than could have 
been induced by any degree of anger or severity. 
Violence in the parent wakens only fear towards 
the parent, while it is fear of the sin that can 
alone regenerate the child's heart Fear towards 
the parent will lead him to hide his wrong doings ; 
but fear towards sin will lead him to put it away. 
He cannot be too early taught to feel the nearness 
of Ins Heavenly Father, and the impossibility of 
hiding anything from Him. Parents must, how- 
ever, beware that their own lives show that they 
feel all that they teach ; for if children find a nicer 
morality is expected from them than their parents 
practise in their own persons, they will soon see 



180 PARENTAL DUTY. 

through and despise the hypocrisy. If you would 
make your child reverent, and obedient, and truth- 
ful, you must make your own life the exemplifica- 
tion of your teachings. You have no right to 
expect your child to be better than yourself; but 
if he should be, — for a child much oftener rises 
above his education than sinks below it, — you 
must remember that his respect for you must 
diminish in proportion as his virtue increases. 




SIMPLE PLEASURES. 



" We must sow the seeds, and tend the growth, if we would en- 
joy the flower." 

" If happiness is the rarest of blessings, it is because the recep- 
tion of it is the rarest of virtues." — Souvestre. 




XV. 



SIMPLE PLEASURES. 




[MONG the very small number of plants that 
has formed my winter garden are two rose- 
bushes, a Safrano and a Giant of Battles ; the 
one the saffron yellow that we see occasionally in 
the sky at sunset, and the other so richly red that 
it reminds me of Herbert's stanza : 



" Sweet rose ! whose hue, angry and brave, 
Bids the rash gazer wipe his eye : 
Thy root is ever in its grave ; — 

And thou must die." 



The plants are small, and have given me only 
one or two blossoms at a time ; but I have found 
so much pleasure in watching them, from the time 
the bud first formed until the petals unfolded their 
perfected beauty, that I have been drawn to think 
a good deal of the many pleasures with which this 
world abounds, and which we neglect to enjoy. 
(183) 



184 SIMPLE PLEASURES. 

We look at a fine hot-house full of flowers and 
think how delightful it must be to own such a 
place ; and possibly, instead of enjoying its beauty 
heartily, as we would that of a fine prospect, or a 
glorious sky, that thought of possession embitters 
our heart, and we turn moodily away, wondering 
why God is so much more indulgent to our neigh- 
bor than He is to us. 

Now it is my conviction that the enjoyment of 
possessions does not increase in proportion to their 
number and magnitude. It does not seem to me 
that persons who keep gardeners to take care of 
their plants gain as much actual enjoyment from 
them as I gain from mine, of which I take the en- 
tire care myself. It is not the having things in 
our possession merely that enables us to enjoy 
them, but it is the way our affections are developed 
by their means. There is, to be sure, the base- 
born pleasure of shining in the eyes of our neigh- 
bors, which may be gotten through fine houses, fine 
clothes, fine gardens, or any possession we may 
have ; but such pleasure is not happiness, and does 
not involve the true enjoyment of anything that 
we possess. If we are vain of anything we have, 
it is no longer that thing which gives us pleasure, 



SIMPLE PLEASURES. 185 

but only the admiration excited by it in our neigh- 
bors. 

The true enjoyment of anything which helps to 
make us happy, is based upon the adaptation of 
that thing to the wants of our own minds, and is 
entirely independent of anything our neighbor may 
think about it. 

The use of pleasure is to rest and recreate the 
mind, and our enjoyment of it is in exact propor- 
tion to the rest and recreation we get from it. 
One person may be surrounded by the greatest 
variety of luxuries, in houses, gardens, and 
grounds, of his own possession, and yet not get 
so much enjoyment and recreation from them as 
another will from strolling among simple scenes of 
nature, and contemplating earth and sky as God's 
glorious handiwork. When we give ourselves 
heartily up to the enjoyment of anything which, 
like the ocean, the sky, or a vast landscape, by 
its very nature precludes all thought of posses- 
sion, we are lifted into a far higher enjoyment than 
when we can say, " How much I wish this was 
mine ! " and if we cast all feelings of envy out 
from our hearts, we can enjoy the possessions of 
our neighbors as much as if they were our own. 
Vanity of our own possessions, and envy at those 



186 SIMPLE PLEASURES. 

of our neighbor, are different expressions of the 
same vice. A man who is rich and vain, would 
be envious if he were poor ; and the poor man who 
is envious will be sure to become vain if he become 
rich. With both it is the opinion of the neighbor 
that constitutes the value of all that is possessed. 

Domestic happiness depends in a very great de- 
gree on the enjoyment that is derived from simple 
pleasures. If a mother devote herself entirely to 
work, she cannot make an attractive home for her 
husband and children, any farther than the wants 
of the body are concerned. A boy will like to 
come home at meal times, and to sleep, if his 
mother supplies him with good bed and board ; 
but if that is all she prepares for him, he will seek 
entertainment in the streets at other hours, and 
each year of his life will find him less able to en- 
joy the innocent pleasures that belong to a happy 
home. A girl who sees her mother so devoted to 
household care that she allows herself no time for 
anything else, learns to look upon domestic duty 
as mere drudgery, and avoids it as far as she pos- 
sibly can. 

There is nothing children wish for so much as 
sympathy, and this can be given without interfer- 
ing with any domestic avocation. There is noth- 



SIMPLE PLEASURES. 187 

ing in sewing, or cooking, or washing, or ironing, 
that need absorb the thoughts so that a mother 
cannot talk to a child, or listen to its story-books, 
while she is engaged in them. I have observed 
that women who thus keep their sympathies open 
to their children do not grow nervous, and prema- 
turely old, like those who fix their minds entirely 
upon the work that engages their hands, and who 
have only impatient words to give their children 
when they try to talk with them while they are at 
work. 

There is nothing in the recollections of my own 
childhood that I look back upon with so much 
pleasure as the reading aloud my books to my 
mother. She was then a woman of many cares, 
and in the habit of engaging in every variety of 
household work. Whatever she might be doing 
in kitchen, or dairy, or parlor, she was always 
ready to listen to me, and to explain whatever I 
did not understand. There was always with her 
an under-current of thought about other things, 
mingling with all her domestic duties, lightening and 
modifying them, but never leading her to neglect 
them, or to perform them imperfectly. I believe 
it is to this trait of her character that she owes the 
elasticity and ready social sympathy that still ani- 



188 SIMPLE PLEASURES. 

mates her under the weight of almost four-score 
years. How much I owe to the care and sym- 
pathy she gave to my childish years, I cannot 
measure. 

I am induced to speak of my own personal ex- 
perience on this point because mothers not unfre- 
quently deny that they can talk and work at the 
same time ; and find in their various needful oc- 
cupations a ready excuse for giving their children 
short answers, and keeping them away from their 
presence as much as possible. My purpose is to 
recommend nothing as a duty that I have not seen 
practised with success, and which I am not sure is 
entirely within the power of every parent who is 
willing to perform the duties belonging to that 
holy office. 

But I have wandered very far away from the 
roses whence I set out, and which I intended to 
have made the leading text of my discourse. 

The love of flowers is almost universal among 
children. The baby in its cradle stretches its tiny 
fingers eagerly after them, and the older child 
passes many of its happiest hours in seeking for 
wild-flowers. We always enjoy those posses- 
sions most which we have done something our- 
selves in order to obtain ; and children at a very 



SIMPLE PLEASURES. 189 

early age find not only an interesting, but a very 
valuable amusement in cultivating plants. 

Our Heavenly Father gives the most valuable 
and the most beautiful of his gifts to us with an 
abounding liberality : light and air and water for 
the body, the glories of earth and sky for the soul ; 
the sky sown with stars, shining for every one of 
his children ; earth sown with flowers, blooming 
freely for all. 

One of the purest of all the simple pleasures 
that go to make up domestic happiness, is the cul- 
ture of flowers. They come within the means of 
every one. If you have a garden you can soon 
fill it with beautiful plants brought from the woods 
and fields, with no expense but the pleasure of col- 
lecting them. If you live in a city, and in the 
winter, whether in city or country, a few cents 
will give you a plant that will be a source of enjoy- 
ment to you for months ; and a few shillings will 
fill your window with them. Raising plants your- 
self, either from seeds or slips, is very easy ; and 
the process will be full of interest for your children. 
This interest may be greatly increased if you will 
get some simple work on Botany and read it with 
your children. Gray's " How Plants Grow," is 
the best book for this purpose that has ever been 



190 SIMPLE PLEASURES. 

published, and simple as a child's talk. If the 
subject be new to you you will very probably find 
yourself desiring to know more about plants after 
you have made yourself acquainted with this 
charming little book ; and if so, you will find the 
larger works by the same author full of interest. 
If you wish to understand how to manage your 
plants skilfully, Mrs. Loudon's "Ladies' Com- 
panion to the Flower-Garden " will probably an- 
swer every question you will wish to ask. 

You will soon find that plants are not mere 
playthings ; mere sources of amusement ; but a 
cheering presence in your solitude, a manifold re- 
source for pleasure and instruction with your chil- 
dren ; and in watching the various stages of their 
growth, and the varying care they require, you 
will gain valuable suggestions for the mental as 
well as, physical training of yourself no less than 
of your children . The development of thought and 
affection in the mind is so curiously analogous to 
vegetable growth, that plants are an endless source 
of instruction ; and the more we learn from them, 
the more our perceptions are quickened for new 
discoveries. A window full of plants has more 
material for thought in it than one who has not 
tried it can possibly imagine. It is all healthy 



SIMPLE PLEASURES. 191 

thought, too, unless the mind is very perverse or 
morbid ; and throws a grace about the matter-of- 
fact cares of daily life, which, without some re- 
creative resource, are apt to make mind and body 
grow old before their time. 

There is one common mistake to be avoided in 
the selection of plants for house culture ; and that 
is o-ettin^ too manv. and taking them too indis- 
criminately. A few nice plants will afford you 
much more pleasure than many indifferent ones. 
Do not have more than you can accommodate 
without inconvenience, and take thoroughly good 
care of without their becoming troublesome. The 
attempt to possess too much of any thing dimin- 
ishes our enjoyment of it even more than the hav- 
ing less than we could conveniently use. The true 
enjoyment of anything depends upon its adaptation 
to our tastes, and the amount of mental recreation 
and development we get from it ; and not upon its 
quantity, or its value in the estimation of the 
world. 




FILIAL AND PARENTAL LOVE. 



^« < >fr»»— 



"Call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your 
Father, which is in heaven."— Words of the Lord. 



<SSIZZ22? 




XVI. 



FILIAL AND PARENTAL LOVE, 



(jfefj^HAT the relationship existing, between pa- 
llid rent and child, as implying one ruling and 
the other ruled, belongs wholly to our temporal 
state, is a truth that must become apparent so 
soon as we reflect upon the eternal relation exist- 
ing between every human being and the Heavenly 
Father. In the future life parent and child will 
doubtless seek each other and love each other, 
with an affection growing out of the love that 
bound them together here; but in the heavens, 
where all exist forever in the prime and perfection 
of adult life, a relationship, the essence of which 
is the result of difference in age, must naturally 
be lost, and those who were parents and children 
here must there become brothers and sisters, all 
filial and parental feeling being forgotten in a 
(195) 



196 FILIAL AND PARENTAL LOVE. 

universal and childlike adoration of the one only 
Father. 

Parents should bear this truth in mind, that it 
may modify the control they exercise over their 
children from the very beginning of their lives. 
Children should be controlled in order, that they 
may learn to control themselves ; guided, that 
they may learn to guide themselves. The parent 
should teach the child to feel that in obeying him 
he obeys the law of God ; and as the child advan- 
ces in years, he should be taught to seek in God's 
law for the guidance and control that he found in 
his parents at an earlier age. 

Pride and love of dominion in the heart of the 
parent often make it very hard to give up parental 
authority, even after children become men and 
women ; but the happiest, because the most heav- 
enly, domestic relations can only be established 
where the filial and parental affections are gradu- 
ally merged into a brotherly and sisterly love, no 
one seeking to command another, but all seeking 
to obey the Heavenly Father. 

The ease with which parents control their chil- 
dren depends upon the degree in which they control 
themselves. A parent who is petulant, or irrita- 
ble, or passionate, never can control a child with- 



FILIAL AXD PARENTAL LOVE. 197 

out a contest, because the child is never sure that 
he shall be obliged to obey if he resist. Petulance 
and ill-temper are childish weapons ; and parents 
who make use of them put themselves on a level 
with their children, and have no true authority 
over them. Self-control is a weapon a child can- 
not use, and the parent who is armed with it is 
sure of an easy victory. 

Self-control is not always a virtue, because it 
may be the result of pride of character. When 
this is the case, the parent may exercise a perfect 
control over the child, but his power will be evil, 
because he will endeavor to be as a god in his 
own house, and instead of lifting the minds of his 
children to the worship of the Heavenly Father, 
he will try to fix them upon himself with an idol- 
atrous reverence. Parents who take pride in the 
obedience of their children never wish to give 
up their power over them, and they sometimes 
induce a pride of filial feeling in their children 
that leads them to continue their obedience so 
long as they live in this world. This is very 
wrong on both sides ; for the parent asks* and the 
child gives, what of right belongs to the Lord. 
Every adult person is responsible in the first and 
highest degree to the Lord, and breaks the first 



198 FILIAL AND PARENTAL LOVE. 

and greatest Commandment if he suffer his sense of 
right and wrong to be controlled by any human 
being. Idol worship cannot cease to be a sin, 
even though the idol be a parent. 

More frequently pride of dominion in the parent, 
though it may control the child in early life, rouses 
opposition as he becomes older ; and the most 
painful discord is the result of the attempt of the 
parent to retain what no longer of right belongs 
to him. Parents who are unwilling to acknowl- 
edge that their children are men and women when 
they become so, and who endeavor to keep from 
them the liberty wherewith the Lord makes all his 
children free, have no true conception of the pa- 
rental office ; and in striving to retain that which 
does not belong to them, they lose the affectionate 
respect which they might always enjoy, if they 
would but love their children as free human beings 
and not as property ; as belonging not to them 
but to the Lord. Parents who are governed by 
pride and the love of dominion are apt to deceive 
themselves into the belief that their love for their 
children is truly parental ; and if their children op- 
pose them as they grow older, they feel themselves 
deeply wronged, and often become full of resent- 
ment towards them. The Scriptures tell us a 



FILIAL AKD PARENTAL LOYE. 199 

mother may forget her child, but that the Lord 
will never forget us ; and the indulgence of pride, 
and the love of rule, which is very sure to accom- 
pany pride, render a mother peculiarly liable to 
forget her maternal love. They only are true 
parents who cannot feel anger and resentment to- 
wards their children. 

It is a very noticeable fact that a parent almost 
never turns away from a child who leads a bad 
life, a life of opposition to the law of God. When 
we hear that a parent has turned from his child, 
forgotten his parental feeling, we are almost sure 
to hear that the child has thwarted the parent's 
will. If he had opposed only the will of his 
Heavenly Father, his earthly father could have 
forgiven him ; but opposition to his own will is an 
offence not to be overlooked. 

I am inclined to believe that we may lay it down 
as an axiom, that it is never religious principle, 
but always pride, that holds dominion in a pa-' 
rent's heart when he turns away from his child. 

To those in whom filial and parental affection 
are very strong, it may be a painful thought that 
these will be changed into friendship in the world 
to come ; although there need be no diminution 
of the tenderness of affection on either side. 



200 FILIAL AND PARENTAL LOYE. 

When, however, faith is changed to sight, we can 
now but faintly imagine the fulness of filial devo- 
tion with which we shall turn to the Lord. 
Herein must be infinite scope for the exercise 
of all that part of our nature that craves parental 
support ; that delights to look up and worship ; 
that seeks a returning love that cannot grow cold 
or forgetful. For those too who find their great- 
est happiness in the exercise of parental care, there 
will be an endless joy afforded by the multitudes 
of little children daily and hourly passing away 
from earth, and ascending to the heavenly man- 
sions. These are all to be trained step by step in 
the other life as here, only with a certainty of per- 
fect training there that cannot be insured here. 
Every child who passes away from this world, as 
it leaves its mother's arms, is received "by angels 
who are of the female sex, who in the life of the 
body tenderly loved infants, and at the same time 
loved God," and who are of a character precisely 
adapted to meet the wants of these children 
of their adoption, and to educate them into angelic 
life. Thus parental love will find an endless field 
for exercise, and will live on through the coming 
ages ; for heaven can never become full, and earth 



FILIAL AND PARENTAL LOVE, 201 

never cease to swell the tide of life that flows on- 
ward from time to eternity. 

If parents would but awake to a distinct con- 
viction that the children born to them are not 
absolutely their own, but only intrusted to them 
by the Lord, in order that they may receive their 
first lessons in an education that, if rightly begun 
here, will go on unfolding and expanding through 
all eternity into a heavenly life, the progress 
of which will never end, it seems to me that they 
would feel an irresistible incentive to strive to the 
utmost of their ability to bring up their children 
rightly, and to seek from the Lord the instruction 
which He alone can give to guide them in their 
endeavors. 

There is an appalling ignorance and misconcep- 
tion of Scripture, and want of faith in the efficacy 
of prayer, in a large proportion of this so-called 
Christian community, that make Christian life an 
impossibility; and without this there can be no 
true education, no leading out of those higher 
faculties of man which lift him above the brute. 

In order to educate your children, you must 
first be educated yourself; and you should exam- 
ine yourself to ascertain how well you are pre- 
pared for your office of teacher. You may train 



202 FILIAL AND PARENTAL LOVE. 

them into all worldly wisdom by means of the in- 
struction the world will give you; but if you 
believe in a future life, and that there is a connec- 
tion between that and the present, you must feel 
desirous that your children should be prepared to 
enter upon it with a reasonable hope of happiness. 
The world can give you no information in regard 
to a preparation for heaven. It can teach you to 
lay up all manner of earthly treasure, but it is 
dumb when you interrogate it concerning heavenly 
things. 

God and the Bible are the only sources whence 
positive truth can come to humanity; and they 
only are truly educated who have learned how to 
obtain the truth from these sources. It will not 
do to confine the reading of Scripture to Sunday, 
or to days when you have leisure. It must be 
daily food to you if you would have a symmetrical 
growth to your spiritual nature. The soul de- 
pends on daily food as much as the body, in order 
to become healthy and strong. You cannot com- 
prehend the Scriptures if you only read them now 
and then. They yield their wisdom only to those 
who seek to make them the daily law of their 
lives, and who come to them reverently and pray- 



FILIAL, AND PARENTAL LOYE. 203 

erfully, believing them to be the veritable Word 
of God. 

More directly still we may obtain heavenly 
truth from the Heavenly Father himself, in an- 
swer to our prayers, if we will pray to Him as 
children pray, believing that He is our personal 
friend, ready to help us through every doubt and 
emergency, to strengthen us in all weakness and 
trial, to give unto us whatever we ask in devout 
faith. 

God's Word and prayer to Him are as needful 
to one who would lead a Christian life, as the 
compass and the observations of the heavenly 
bodies are to the mariner. We should all con- 
demn the folly of a shipmaster, who let his vessel 
sail on without daily observations of his latitude 
and longitude ; but if we begin a day without 
looking for aid to our Heavenly Father, we drift 
through our affairs just as foolishly. Rocks and 
quicksands are all about us, and we are liable to 
mistakes at every moment. Unless the spiritual 
sun is shining into our souls we are walking in 
darkness, and we have no reason to expect to re- 
ceive its light unless we open our hearts to it by 
prayer. We must ask before we receive; we 



204 FILIAL AND PARENTAL LOVE, 

must seek before we Shall find ; we must knock 
before the heavenly door will be opened to us. 

I suppose there is no duty in life more difficult 
to perform rightly than the training of children, 
and no parent has any right to hope for success 
unless he uses every means that the Divine Provi- 
dence affords. The Lord tells us: "I am the 
light of the world : he that followeth me shall not 
walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life." 
There is no light for the soul but that which Com- 
eth from Him ; but unless the soul turns itself to- 
wards Him it cannot receive His light, though it 
shines perpetually with abounding fulness. It 
forces itself upon no one, and we cannot perceive 
it until we feel that we are wandering in darkness, 
and voluntarily seek after it. No day is wisely 
begun that does not begin with prayer, and when 
moments come throughout the day in which we 
are perplexed with doubt as to which way our 
duty lies, or troubled with temptation to do that 
which is wrong, or to refrain from doing that 
which is right, momentary aspiration heavenward 
will instruct us, and strengthen us better than all 
that the world or our own souls can tell us. 
Could we but remember this at all times we might 
lead heavenly lives while yet dwelling upon earth ; 



FILIAL AXD PARENTAL LOYE. 205 

but the world and our own self-love too often 
blind our eyes to heavenly visions, stop our ears 
to heavenly voices, and make us forget their exist- 
ence when we stand most in need of their aid. 
Through them alone our spiritual natures can be- 
come educated, and through them alone can we 
learn how to meet the daily exigencies that arise 
in the training of children. The ear of the Lord 
is ever open to our questionings. Let us strive 
not to forget to ask of Him all that we need. 




DISAPPOINTMENTS. 



K^N3 / 3/S@\§ v e^>^ 



"Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; who passing 
through the valley of misery maketh of it a well. ,, — Psalms of 
David. 



Q^5> 





xvn. 

DISAPPOINTMENTS. 

1THERT0 I have said little of the disap- 
RjHj pointments of a garden, yet they are not 
unfrequent, scattered among its many pleasures. 
The frosts of winter and the droughts of summer 
are often fatal to plants ; while their roots, stalks, 
leaves, and blossoms, each have their peculiar 
enemies among the worm and insect tribes ; some- 
times working insidiously beneath the ground or 
within the bark, and sometimes infesting leaf and 
blossom with their disgusting forms, which are 
rendered the more revolting by the beauty of the 
objects they destroy. Sometimes plants perish 
without any apparent cause, perhaps from some 
natural defect in themselves that incapacitates them 
from being nourished into a healthy growth. Then 
too our own ignorance or indolence, carelessness or 
14 (209) 



210 DISAPPOINTMENTS. 

forgetfulness, often stand in the way of our suc- 
cess in the garden, as in all other departments of 
life. 

Were it not for this liability to disappointment 
the garden would offer but a very imperfect cor- 
respondence to human life ; for there uncertainty 
hangs over all things. Many, and indeed most 
disappointments in life, as well as in the garden, 
are the direct consequence of our own shortcomings 
in the fulfilment of our duties ; but there are others 
which come from causes we cannot foresee nor 
control, which the natural man hates as the work 
of chance ; but before which the spiritual man 
bows in humble submission, for the voice within 
his soul says: "Be still, and know that I am 
God." 

When we fail in our endeavors we should be 
careful to ascertain if some neglect of our own is 
not the cause of what we suffer. In our unwil- 
lingness to criminate ourselves, we may call that a 
dispensation of Providence which is the direct 
result of our own misconduct ; and unless we 
acknowledge this honestly, we shall be liable to a 
life of disappointment. It is generally quite easy 
for us to understand why our neighbor does not 
succeed in his undertakings ; and if we would but 



DISAPPOINTMENTS . 211 

silence the pratings of self-love, we might as 
easily comprehend our own failures. 

If we procure roots and seeds, and place them 
m our gardens without knowing anything of the 
habits of the plants that are to come from them, 
we must look forward to probable failure in their 
growth ; yet it is no uncommon thing to see men 
and women, in the daily walks of life, setting causes 
at work with just as little regard to consequences ; 
as it were sowing seeds at random, and then com- 
plaining that things do not come up right ; — sow- 
ing dog-wood and ivy, and wondering that they 
will come up poisonous ; scattering the seeds of all 
manner of ill-named plants, and then complaining 
that their ground is full of weeds. 

Ignorance is one reason for all this, but it is not 
an excuse ; because we have no right to work 
ignorantly. Want of thought is another reason ; 
but neither have we a right to be thoughtless. 

An unsuccessful life sometimes appears to be 
the result of mental incompetency ; but if we look 
a little closer we are pretty sure to find that this 
incompetency is moral, and that a better morality 
would have obviated it. Pride, vanity, self-indul- 
gence, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and indolence 
are the immoralities that are perpetually bringing 



212 DISAPPOINTMENTS . 

failure to the endeavors of those who are their 
slaves ; and it is seldom we can find failure apart 
from one or another of them. 

When disappointment comes to us, do not let 
us fold our hands and call it a dark Providence 
until we have catechised our own hearts honestly 
with such questions as these : — 

Did vanity induce me to attempt something I 
might have known was beyond my ability to reach ? 
Did pride make me .unwilling to do all that I 
should to attain my purpose, or prevent me from 
seeking information from others as to the means 
of attaining it? Did self-indulgence lead me to 
spend extravagantly the property or the time that 
should have been used in my business, or indolence 
prevent my making a due application of it ? Did 
the desire of shining in the eyes of my neighbors 
lead me to live beyond my income, and incur 
debts that I had no reason to expect I should be 
able to pay ? 

It is not often that failure in endeavors after 
worldly success comes to us if we can answer all 
questions involving our own fault in the negative. 
In fact, failure in social life, with no moral cause 
by which it may be accounted for, is as rare as 
failure in gardening with no apparent physical 



DISAPPOINTMENTS . 213 

cause. If we choose a situation in a good soil, 
and plant and cultivate with such knowledge as we 
may readily attain if we will, we can hardly fail to 
have a fine garden ; and even a poor soil may with 
patience and skilful industry be made to produce 
some kinds of plants and fruits quite worth the 
pains. So in all positions of life, if we will but 
work with determined industry, and spend with 
conscientious economy, it must be some extra- 
ordinary cause that prevents our success ; and if 
we fail for a while, we are almost sure to succeed 
at last. 

In speaking of spending with conscientious 
economy, I do not wish to be understood as mean- 
ing spending money alone. Strength both of 
mind and body, eye-sight, and every pow r er and 
means of effort and of use that we possess, we 
may squander uselessly, or in vain and impatient 
endeavors after too speedy a success. Health and 
strength of body and of mind are the two choicest 
gifts we can inherit, and if w^e waste them we are 
more foolish and more reprehensible than they who 
throw away external wealth ; because that may be 
regained, while impaired faculties can never be 
restored to their original vigor. Moreover, the 
waste of any power or means, even though it be 



214 BIS APPOINTMENTS . 

recovered, involves a waste of time that can never 
be recovered. Time lost is lost forever, and the 
greatness of the loss is something we cannot 
measure. The gifts of God are many and various, 
and happy are we if we use them, whatever they 
may be, remembering that they are His gifts ; and 
that whether we have one talent or ten intrusted 
to our keeping, we are alike responsible to Him, 
each in our proportion, for the manner in which 
we employ them. 

To meet disappointments, that come to us we 
know not from what cause, or to what end, with a 
serene faith in the wisdom and love of our Hea- 
venly Father, is one of our most important, and 
often one of our most difficult duties. Human 
pride wishes to understand all things, and to sub- 
due all things to its will ; and when it finds itself 
entangled and overcome in a web of circumstance 
that it can neither comprehend nor control, it is 
wounded to its inmost depths, and feels itself un- 
kindly and unjustly dealt by. 

While we are successful in our undertakings, 
and all goes well with us, we are apt to be con- 
tent with ourselves, and to suppose we are leading 
very good lives, and we offer our thanksgivings 
and prayers to heaven in a joyful spirit, running, 



DIS APPOINTMENTS . 215 

as it were, to meet the Lord, like the young man 
who had great possessions. The Lord looks upon 
us with a clearer vision than our own, and sees 
that we lack that love for Him which would make 
us feel that all we have is His and not our own, 
and He tells us this by taking from us some- 
thing we highly prize ; wealth or health, child or 
friend. Instead of perceiving and worshipping the 
Infinite Mercy, we turn away sorrowing, for we 
had deemed our possessions our own ; and pride 
so blinds our eyes that we are incapable of seeing 
why we should be called upon to give them up. 

The implicit obedience which a wise parent re- 
quires of a young child, is the counterpart of the 
submission which we owe to our Heavenly Father. 
Spiritually we are but children so long as we re- 
main in this world. We are often as unable to 
comprehend why our Heavenly Father denies our 
wishes, as a baby is why his mother will not suffer 
him to put his hands into the pretty flame of the 
lamp he grasps after so eagerly. Painful experi- 
ence soon teaches the child that wisdom and love 
came between him and his desires ; and so we, if 
we make any advances in spiritual growth, can 
look back and comprehend many things which 
were quite dark to us when they took place. 



216 DIS APPOINTMENTS . 

Discipline is always painful to us while we are 
suffering it, just in proportion as it is needful to 
us ; and it is not until we have reached a plane 
above it that we can fully comprehend it. The 
early growth of every good principle planted in 
the soul is dark and secret, like the sprouting of 
seed in the earth, and it is only He who plants 
who knows what should come of it. If we submit 
ourselves in faithful love to the culture of the 
Heavenly Gardener, we shall gradually discover 
the result of His work in the development of traits 
of character that will be a perpetual source of 
peace and joy to us. 

A child who has been brought up by religious 
parents in the habit of implicit obedience, has re- 
ceived from them the best possible preparation for 
meeting the disappointments of life with calm and 
patient trust in the parental providence of God ; 
and this is the surest foundation on which human 
happiness can be built. We sometimes hear 
parents say that they will indulge their children in 
everything they can, because care and disappoint- 
ment will come fast enough as they grow up ; but 
such indulgence in early life makes care and dis- 
appointment doubly hard to bear when they come. 
A child whose wilfulness and selfishness and in- 



DIS APPOINTMENTS . 217 

dolence are indulged is never happy in child- 
hood ; and when he grows up and finds his plans 
and wishes thwarted by a power he cannot with- 
stand, and whose wisdom and mercy he is incom- 
petent to comprehend, he "kicks against the 
pricks" in impotent rage or despair, having no 
staff to support him under the chastisement of the 
Divine rod. Trusting obedience to the earthly 
parent is a germ that naturally and easily unfolds 
and expands into an obedient and loving faith in 
the Heavenly Parent ; and that is the only never- 
failing support in the hour of trial and disappoint- 
ment. 




DROUGHT. 



" My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distil as 
the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the 
showers upon the grass." — Deuteronomy. 



~*J£/fi>- 




xvm. 



DROUGHT. 




IING the past spring our neighborhood 
suffered from a drought of such severity as 
occurs not more than once in a long series of years. 
The air was so dry and parched that it could not 
give its usual refreshment to the lungs, and the 
earth lacked moisture to feed the roots of the 
vegetable world. 

My garden, instead of luring me out in the 
pleasant days of April, as it has done in previous 
years, repelled me by its aridness ; and I found so 
little pleasure in doing what seemed absolutely 
essential for its preservation, that it was difficult 
for me to remember that hitherto all I had done 
there had been a labor of love. 

Such seasons, though poor in what we love to 
seek after, are rich in instruction ; and though 
(221) 



222 DROUGHT. 

natural fruits may be denied us, spiritual ones are 
always to be found. 

A period of drought in the natural world cor- 
responds to the periods in our spiritual experience 
when we lack heavenly truth to support the wants 
of the soul ; when our spiritual bodies are parched 
and feverish, and we have not strength to bear the 
heat of the Divine Love. The Divine Love shines 
always upon us, just as the sun shines always 
upon the earth ; but unless its heat is tempered by 
clouds and rain it becomes distressing, and seems 
baneful rather than beneficent. 

The soul that has made little or no progress in 
the regenerate life cannot feel that the Divine 
Providence is always full of tenderness and mercy 
in its dealings with mankind. It writhes under 
the bereavements and disappointments of life, like 
an infant undergoing some surgical operation when 
it is -too young to have any comprehension of its 
necessity. The parents look on and weep at the 
suffering of the child, but pray the surgeon to go 
on in spite of its cries ; for they can understand 
that some future good is to follow, so essential to 
the child's health or life that the present pain is 
not to be weighed against it for a moment. So 
the angels, if they are aware of our mental suffer- 



DROUGHT. 223 

ing under the knife of the Divine Surgeon, would 
not ask him to stay His hand ; for they would 
perceive the disease from which he was striving to 
deliver us, and would beg us to yield ourselves 
confidingly to His efforts in our behalf, that we 
might be made whole. 

The water and the mineral substances which 
plants take up through their roots out of the earth, 
correspond to natural truth and goodness. The 
light and heat which come down to them from the 
sun, correspond to spiritual truth and goodness. 
These four aliments, in due proportion, are all 
essential to the complete development of the plant ; 
and if either becomes excessive, or is diminished, 
so as to lose its proportion with the rest, the plant 
suffers, and perhaps dies. 

The human soul is just as dependent for its 
regenerate life and growth upon natural and spir- 
itual goodness and truth as the plant is upon the 
varieties of sustenance it derives from earth and 
sky. 

Natural truth and goodness guide and support 
us in all the duties of life that relate to natural 
things. They make us faithful in the performance 
of all that relates to the professions, trades, and 
daily external duties of every kind that belong to 



224 DROUGHT. 

life in this world. Spiritual truth and goodness 
guide and support us in the duties that belong to 
the internal life, bringing the thoughts and affec- 
tions into harmony with the Divine Law, so that 
we not only do our duty, but love to do it; 
because we feel that inasmuch as we are faithful in 
the performance of all the daily charities of life 
towards our fellow-beings, we are doing them unto 
the Lord, and so coming day by day nearer to 
Him. 

A plant may grow quite rankly into foliage 
under a clouded sky, sustained by a much larger 
proportion of water and of minerals than of light 
and heat ; but in order to produce blossoms and 
fruits, which is the essential object of a plant, 
light and heat must come from above in due 
proportion to the nutriment its roots suck up from 
below ; while, at the same time, the plant never 
requires so large a quantity of what it draws from 
the earth as when it is lifting its crowning graces 
of flowers and fruits towards heaven. Herein* is 
involved a very important correspondence, teaching 
a truth but little understood in the world at large. 

It is quite a common idea that spiritual life lifts 
us out of and above material and natural life; 
instead of which, the more spiritualized we become, 



DROUGHT. 225 

the better we appreciate the value of the natural 
life, and the more faithful we become in the dis- 
charge of our material duties. A human being 
can no more rise above the duties of the natural 
life than a plant can rise above drawing up nutri- 
ment through its roots. One who tries to lead a 
spiritual life apart from the world, and without 
recognizing the social duties, is like a cut flower in 
a vase of water, which, though it may retain its 
beauty for many days, can never perfect its fruit. 

Whenever the dispensations of Providence are 
contrary to our wishes, and we are not able to 
comprehend them, we suffer spiritual drought. 
The love of our Heavenly Father is invariable ; 
and He is constantly doing all that He can, with- 
out infringing upon our liberty, to draw us to 
Himself. We are not always able to receive the 
dispensations of His love, because we have not 
truth enough in our minds to comprehend that it 
is love. So long as the desires of our hearts are 
satisfied, we feel that His love is blessing us, and 
we rejoice in the warmth of the Heavenly Sun ; 
but when His love denies us our desires, and 
bereaves us of our possessions, if we cannot per- 
ceive the wisdom and mercy of the dispensation, 
we no longer feel that the heavenly sun sheds a 

15 



226 DROUGHT. 

grateful warmth upon us, for it seems like a 
" consuming fire." Then the soul is parched with 
drought, and its good affections and true thoughts 
languish and wither; but they do not perish 
entirely if we have any remains of genuine faith in 
the Lord within our souls. Such remnants of 
faith are like the moisture stored up in the earth, 
which is made to rise by the heat of the soil when 
it is parched in the sunshine. The more care- 
fully the soil of the garden is cultivated during a 
drought the easier it is for the heat of the sun to 
penetrate it, and to bring the hidden moisture 
upward to the roots of the plants. So when we 
are most severely tried by spiritual drought we 
suffer much less if we go on doing our duty 
faithfully in all the external details of life, and 
weed out evil affections and irreverent thoughts as 
they spring up, and threaten to choke the better 
growth of the mind. If we neglect our duties, 
our hearts become hardened so that the rays of 
the Divine Love cannot penetrate them, and the 
roots of our good affections find no moisture to 
feed upon. Then, too, the more carefully we 
keep our hearts tender by striving to do our duty 
towards every one around us, the better prepared 
we shall be to receive fresh supplies of the Divine 



DROUGHT, 227 

Truth ; just as a soil mellowed by constant culture 
drinks in the falling rain readily, while it is shed 
off if the soil has been suffered to lie baking in the 
sun till a hard crust is formed upon it. Selfish 
repining, that dwells morbidly upon its own griefs, 
neglecting, or forgetting, to open its heart towards 
the neighbor in the daily charities of life, forms 
just such a hardened crust about the soul, impene- 
trable to the Divine Truth that strives to bless it 
by telling it what it should do to be saved. 

There is no form in which water falls from 
heaven to earth which is not used in the Scriptures 
to illustrate the coming down of Heavenly Doctrine 
to the soul. It " comes down like rain upon the 
mown grass ; as showers that water the earth." 
It comes in ' ' a plentiful rain to confirm the 
inheritance of the Lord when it is weary." It 
44 distils as the dew" and drops " as the small rain 
upon the tender herb." "As the rain cometh 
down, and the snow from heaven, and returneth 
not thither, but watereth the earth, and maketh it 
bring forth and bud, that it may give seed to the 
sower, and bread to the eater : so shall my word 
be that goeth forth out of my mouth." 

Varying as the states of the human beings to 
whom it is addressed, it modifies itself to our 



228 DROUGHT. 

necessities, not waiting for us to seek it, but 
striving ever to approach in some form that we 
may be willing to open our hearts and receive 
when it stands and knocks at our door. How 
mean and pitiful is the pride of man when we 
compare it with the infinite humility of the Lord. 
We never sink so low that His love does not 
follow us. We never make our hearts so hard 
that His truth does not strive to penetrate them. 
Even when frost-bound, in the very winter of 
faithlessness, His truth falls about us like the 
snow, and waits till the influence of some good 
affection softens our hearts with its spring-like 
warmth; and then, gently dissolving, it sinks into 
the soil, making it " bring forth and bud, that it 
may give seed to the sower and bread to the 
eater." 

While we remain in this world we must not 
expect to arrive at a spiritual perfection that will 
carry us beyond the changes of state that cor- 
respond to the different seasons of the year, with 
their variations of heat and cold, drought and 
moisture. Human progress is never steadily 
upward, never unwaveringly onward, towards the 
heavenly goal. The loves of self and of the world 



DROUGHT. 229 

never die out entirely even in the best ; and so 
often as we yield to their allurements we forget 
the Lord and the neighbor, thinking only how we 
may follow out the devices of our own hearts. 
But we can never find peace or rest w^hile we are 
thus led astray, unless pride and selfishness be- 
come so entirely dominant in our souls as to 
suffocate our capacity for distinguishing between 
right and wrong, truth and falsehood. The image 
and likeness of God into which the spiritual body 
of the human race was originally created, though 
defaced and broken in our fallen natures, still 
mourns and laments within us, asserting its claim 
to be restored to its integrity ; and we can never 
escape from its complaints unless we banish every 
heavenly aspiration from our souls. Accordingly 
as we resist or yield ourselves to these aspirations 
our pilgrimage is through drought, and coldness, 
and sterility, or through softly-falling rain, and 
grateful sunshine, and fertile fields. 

As the manner in which the earth inclines itself 
towards the sun, and the condition of its garment 
of atmosphere, decide in what form moisture shall 
fall upon its surface, so our states and spheres 
decide whether the Divine Truth shall be presented 



230 JDEOUGHT. 

to us with a harshness corresponding to hail, or 
snow, or tempest, or whether it shall come like 
the gentle dew or the softly-falling rain. Happy 
are we if we recognize and accept it when it 
comes 5 be its form or its medium what it may ! 




INSECTS AND WORMS. 



— **««<>#»*— 



Noxious insects and worms are to the garden what sensuous 
falsities are to the spiritual life : small and unimportant as they 
may seem, they are possessed of a fearful power to destroy. 



<^22£ 




XIX. 

INSECTS AND WORMS. 

||9|I/HEEE are no disappointments connected 
l^llli w ^h g ar den culture that are more hard to 
bear than those which we suffer through the depre- 
dations of insects and of worms. We often ob- 
serve some thrifty young plant wilting without any 
apparent cause. If we touch it it falls into the 
hand, and we find that it has been cut off just be- 
low the surface of the earth ; and on opening the 
earth we find a large white worm who has done the 
mischief. Many seedlings are devoured by insects 
as soon as their leaves are formed, and others suf- 
fer in foliage and flowers at a later period. In- 
sects so small that one can hardly imagine them 
capable of doing much harm, yet come in such 
numbers as to prove a pest over a whole garden. 
The more highly we cultivate, the more varied and 
numerous these enemies become, and the choicest 
(233) 



234 INSECTS AND WORMS. 

flowers and the most delicate fruits are those which 
are most attractive to them. To conquer them re- 
quires unwearying watchfulness and perseverance, 
and some of them can hardly be overcome even by 
these. 

Repulsive and annoying as these creatures are, 
they have a lesson for us which we shall do well to 
learn and lay to heart ; for, like all other creatures, 
they exist because they correspond to things with- 
in us, and we should struggle to cast these out 
with far more earnestness than we strive to banish 
insects from our gardens. 

All winged creatures correspond to thoughts or 
perceptions ; and, unwilling as we may be to be- 
lieve it, we all of us have thoughts which are re- 
presented for our instruction in the disgusting 
insect no less than in the beautifully painted butter- 
fly or the graceful bird. 

The flight of birds and insects corresponds to 
the movement of our thoughts ; and we may 
readily perceive many illustrations of this as we 
watch the motions of the common frequenters of 
our gardens. 

There are birds of long and rapid flight, like 
those swift thoughts that sweep the universe and 
scan the whole creation. Birds of strong and 



INSECTS AXD WORMS; 235 

heavy flight, like thoughts that build up arguments, 
and wall themselves around what we accept as 
truth. Birds rapid and combative, flying like the 
thoughts that contend in argument, and often tor- 
ment the stouter enemy although they may not 
overcome him. Birds such as the friendly robin, 
so tame as to be almost domestic, flying but short 
distances , and remaining near the same spot all the 
year around, hibernating in hollow trees and snug 
corners, resembling the thoughts that belong to our 
domestic duties and daily cares ; quiet, unexciting 
thoughts, that build up our homes by forming 
the domestic virtues. And there are birds that 
scale the atmosphere, singing as they rise, until 
they pass beyond human sight and hearing, like 
the adoring thoughts that contemplate the Divine 
perfections. 

Wings correspond to spiritual truths. They are 
the powers by which birds and insects lift them- 
selves upward, just as spiritual truths lift up our 
thoughts towards heaven. 

All things can be perverted, and we are prone 
to turn to evil that which was created good. Our 
thoughts do not always move on wings of spiritual 
truth. Too often we make to ourselves wings of 
falsehood, and it seems to us that they give us 



236 INSECTS AND WORMS. 

power to rise with a bolder and freer flight than 
the others. Not that we acknowledge to ourselves 
that they are of falsehood ; but that we, through 
looking to ourselves instead of to the Lord, as the 
source whence we may draw the truth, distort and 
pervert it, or else lose ourselves in total error. 
When we try to see by our own light, we lose the 
power of seeing by the light which cometh down 
from heaven, and flutter hither and thither with 
uncertain flight, having no sun to direct our course. 
Then our thoughts correspond to unclean birds and 
noxious insects, and worms which are insects in 
their rudimentary states ; and they devour the 
truths we may hold in our memories, perverting 
them into their own forms, just as those creatures 
consume and fatten upon the produce of our gar- 
dens. If the mind becomes wholly immersed in 
falsities it is like a region overspread with locusts, 
that leave neither fruit, flower, nor foliage unde- 
stroyed. 

We sometimes hear a spiritual truth that we re- 
ceive with satisfaction, and it takes root and grows 
like a healthy plant ; but perhaps it is an incon- 
venient truth that lies in the way of the gratifica- 
tion of some selfish desire hidden within our hearts 
so deeply that we are hardly aware of its existence. 



INSECTS AND WORMS. 237 

Every evil desire is married to a lie that is ready 
to assert, so often as we will listen, that its mate 
is good, and that we are fools if we will not in- 
dulge it. If we listen long this lie will bite off the 
root of the opposing truth, and it will wilt away 
and die, and an evil weed of falsehood will pres- 
ently flourish in its place. 

It is a noteworthy fact, that worms do not eat 
up weeds. The hand of the gardener must re- 
move them. Things poisonous and things useless 
flourish freely; but things which serve for food 
and for the delight of the eyes the worm is always 
waiting to devour. 

The slug which has been introduced to our gar- 
dens upon the perpetual roses, is an excessively 
destructive enemy, often making that disgusting 
which would otherwise be the most beautiful of all 
our flowering plants. So society in its most re- 
fined state is probably most full of all manner of 
falsehoods, making for itself a code of convention- 
alisms which it puts in place of all moral and re- 
ligious law, till it is as bare of spiritual truth as a 
rose-bed is bare of greenness when the slug has 
been left to work out its will. In spite of this de- 
struction to the leaves, the roses bloom for several 
seasons, though the life of the plant is eventually 



238 INSECTS AND WORMS. 

overcome by it ; and in this we may see a corres- 
pondence to those persons who make themselves 
attractive in society by the grace and elegance of 
their manners, but in whom all the truths that are 
stored up in childhood, or which are presented to 
them from time to time in later life, are destroyed 
by the sensuous falsities of fashion, that perpetu- 
ally put that which belongs only to the externals 
of life, above that which must remain with us for- 
ever. 

The rose-bugs that devour the blossoms but do 
not touch the leaves, may be compared to those 
falsities which destroy all that is graceful in life, 
basing all ideas of wisdom on a bare and frigid 
utilitarianism. The utilitarian has no idea of good 
beyond material wealth ministering to the physical 
wants of humanity ; and his whole plan of culture, 
intellectual and moral, is based on a desire for the 
attainment of happiness in this world. All that 
leads to purely moral or intellectual happiness, 
apart from material possession, is to him futile 
and visionary. Flowers have no place in his gar- 
den, and the fig-tree should be his favorite plant, 
because it bears fruit without apparently blossom- 
ing. To him it must be an unintelligible mystery 
that the All- Wise has created so many plants that 



INSECTS AND WORMS. 239 

finish their work, so far as we are concerned, when 
they expand their flowers. To be sure, the seeds 
of such plants may feed a great many birds ; but 
then most birds are as useless as flowers. 

We are apt to feel that refinement and culture 
must be inherently good, and that persons sur- 
rounded by ^Jegance and luxury are shielded from 
temptation to evil far more than those who dwell 
amid poverty and ignorance. Yet in truth no 
class of human beings are in greater danger of 
putting truth for falsehood and falsehood for truth, 
than those who dwell at ease amid the luxuries of 
wealth. The senses are so constar+ly ministered to 
in the refined life of the present day, that it requires 
no small amount of determination to avoid becoming 
completely enslaved by them. The eye and ear, 
the touch and taste and smell, are all pampered to 
the utmost by the luxurious appointments of 
modern civilization, till their wants often become 
paramount to all others, and a refined sensualism 
becomes the highest good to which the soul aspires. 
Out of this sensualism a whole code of laws is 
evolved, upon which the morality of society is 
based, without regard to the absolute and eternal 
laws of right and wrong, which have been sent 
down from heaven for our guidance. The falsities 



240 INSECTS AND WORMS. 

of this code, like the slugs in our rose-beds, cling 
upon every thought of the mind, destroying all 
truth, till nothing but bare forms without life re- 
main. The skeletons, in the shape of leaves, but 
incapable of performing any of their functions, 
that deface the beauty of our gardens, are no more 
useless to the plant than the semblances of truth 
are to the mind, which cling about it when it has 
become enslaved to the senses. 

Sap rises in a plant in a crude state, and is of no 
use until it passes into the leaves, and becomes 
elaborated there into something that can nourish 
vegetable growth, and perfect the fruit ; just as in 
the bodies of animals the blood must be elaborated 
in the lungs before it can nourish the system. 
Truth is to the mind what blood is to the body, or 
sap to the plant ; but it must go through a process 
of elaboration by rational thought in the under- 
standing, before it can promote the mind's growth. 
The understanding is to the mind what the 
lungs are to the body, or the foliage to plants. 
If the understanding is filled with falsities the 
truth cannot abide there, but is driven out or per- 
verted, so that the mind can gain no healthful 
growth. Our highly cultivated gardens breed 
worms and insects no faster than the fastidious re- 



INSECTS AND WORMS. 241 

finement and luxurious self-indulgences of elegant 
society breed falsities ; and spiritual life is nowhere 
in greater danger than where the appliances of 
material life are most abounding. 

These sensuous falsities will tell us that refine- 
ment of feeling is commensurate with refinement of 
external life ; that persons who live poorly think and 
feel coarsely, and are incapable of refined enjoy- 
ment or of tender affection ; and if we believe all 
this, our hearts will be closed against the sufferings 
of the larger part of our fellow beings, and we 
shall be indulgent to ourselves and indifferent to 
them, just in proportion to the degree of faith we 
give to this falsehood. Again, the fallacies of the 
senses may tell us that refinement of feeling is al- 
ways accompanied by refinement of manner, and 
may lead us to a fastidiousness of culture in this 
direction that will shut out from our sympathies 
all who, from ignorance or carelessness, do not 
submit themselves to the same laws of courtesy, 
or elegance, or etiquette, which we choose to adopt 
as our standard. Refined society often condemns 
awkwardness of manner or bluntness of remark, 
as greater sins than impurity of life, and refuses 
its favors to those on whom fashion does not set its 
seal. Christian truth enlarges the heart and 

1G 



242 INSECTS AND WORMS. 

widens the sympathies, while worldly fallacies 
make the heart that feeds upon them narrower and 
colder day by day. 

Sensualism is not, however, confined to refined 
society, any more than worms and insects are con- 
fined to flower-gardens. I have dwelt upon it 
there, because, to many persons, it does not seem 
to occur that there may be just as much of it in 
elegance as there is in coarseness ; and because it 
seems to me that self-asserting fastidiousness of 
manner and conversation rarely has any other 
foundation than sensualism. Christian charity 
pervading the character gives to it a genuine re- 
finement that always respects the rights of others, 
and never puts forth its own claim to homage or 
observation. The fastidiousness of sensualism 
loves to display its fancied superiority by self- 
assertion, and by criticisms upon others ; and this 
often in a way so unfeeling, as to show a total want 
of that genuine Christian refinement that never- 
inflicts a wanton wound. Fastidiousness in man- 
ners, like spiritual pride in morals, draws all its 
life from the love of self and of the world ; while 
true refinement, like true morality, is the outward 
form of love to the neighbor, purified and in- 
structed by love to the Lord. It is very easy for 



IXSECTS AXD WORMS. 243 

every one to perceive that a drunkard or a glutton 
is given up to sensualism ; but this vice in its re- 
finement is not so apparent as in its coarseness. 
The one is, however, no less fatal to spiritual growth 
than the other. We may lead what the world 
calls a faultless life, and yet be wholly immersed 
in sensualism. We may have what the world calls 
perfect taste in art, in literature, in manners, and 
yet never have a thought or feeling that rises above 
the plane of sensualism. 

The sensualism of poverty has but few ways of 
showing itself, and so is manifested with a violence 
that shocks us at once by its coarseness. Every 
advance we make towards wealth opens new modes 
of sensual enjoyment to us, and thus diminishes 
the apparent strength of our sensualism, by spread- 
ing it over a Avider surface. We are disgusted as 
we meet a poor creature in the street, reeking with 
tobacco and spirits, and are full of wonder that he 
will spend so much of his earnings in such coarse 
indulgence of his senses ; and yet perhaps the 
power of spreading a luxurious table for ourselves 
is all that saves us from just such coarseness, and 
we are perhaps as extravagant in this as he whom 
we condemn. ^ So fast as we become possessed of 
the means, we almost all of us lavish all that we 



244 INSECTS AND WORMS. 

can afford, and sometimes much more than we can 
afford, on fine clothes, fine houses, fine furniture, 
delicate food, pictures, statues, plate, horses and 
carriages, and all for the gratification of the senses ; 
and then we lift up our hands in horror at the 
poor who indulge their senses in the only way 
their means permit. And those who indulge 
themselves most lavishly, are usually the loudest 
in condemning the want of self-control in others. 

There is nothing wrong in loving beautiful 
things, or in seeking to possess them, for the senses 
were given us for enjoyment as well as for instruc- 
tion. The sin lies in making enjoyment first, and 
paramount to, the instruction and the use ; and per- 
haps even in forgetting everything but enjoyment ; 
resting, like the brutes that perish, in the now, 
without thinking of the hereafter, which must be 
the result of the now. 

So far as the enjoyments of luxury make us in- 
different to our duties as human beings, account- 
able to our Heavenly Father for the use we make 
of His beneficence, we are resting in the sensual- 
ism of luxury. So far as the possession of luxury 
inflates our pride and vanity, we extinguish our 
intellectual and moral perceptions, .and measure 
all things by a sensual standard. The things 



INSECTS AXD WORMS. 245 

which we perceive through the means of our senses 
are intended to form a basis upon which the things 
of intellectual and moral perception are to be 
built up. If we rest contentedly on the' plane of 
development which belongs to the senses, we in- 
vert the order of our being, putting the intellectual 
and the moral below the sensual ; for we always 
make that which is least developed in our minds 
subservient to that which is more so. 

Whenever our love for music, for art, or for 
luxury in any of its forms, overpowers our judg- 
ment or our morality, making us extravagant in 
acquisition, or selfish in enjoyment, it is because 
our love is sensuous, and we are becoming enslaved 
by the lusts of the eye or the ear, or by the pride 
of life. Purified from what is selfish and worldly, 
the enjoyments that come to us through the senses 
lead us upward to the highest spirituality. Not 
by destroying the senses, but by regenerating them, 
are we to be reformed into the Divine image. 

Some insects lay their eggs in the heart of the 
blossoms of fruit-bearing trees, and as the fruit 
grows the worm hatches, and eats its way into the 
outer world through the food that surrounds it. 
The more delicate fruits are entirely destroyed by 
this means ; but apples and pears thus infested 



246 INSECTS AND WORMS. 

ripen by some morbid process sooner than they 
otherwise would, and drop from the tree, giving 
ns what we call windfalls. These, though inferior 
in quality to those which remain their proper time 
upon the tree, serve us usefully until we can get 
that which is better. Fruits correspond to good 
works ; blossoms, to the the aspirations of the 
mind when it has received the truth, and is de- 
siring to bring it out into good works. The worm 
that is born in the blossom represents a falsity that 
comes into the mind in connection with a truth, 
sometimes stimulating it to good works from bad 
motives. 

We seldom act from entirely true or entirely 
false principles. The true and the false sometimes 
struggle within us for the mastery, and sometimes 
act so harmoniously that we are not aware, unless 
we examine our hearts very carefully, that we are 
actuated by anything but the truth. Pride and 
vanity and selfishness are worms continually com- 
ing to life within the better aspirations of the mind, 
and stimulating it to an activity that makes us 
eager to do seemingly good works ; works wherein 
zeal runs before knowledge, and consequences are 
disregarded as unworthy of consideration. Such 
works are but windfalls of the mind, and not its 



INSECTS AND WORMS. 247 

ripened fruits. The works which are done from 
love to the neighbor, founded upon love to the 
Lord, are like fair, full-grown fruits, ripened duly 
by sun and shower. Works seemingly good, but 
which derive their impulse wholly or in part from 
the love of self and of the world, are like fruits 
full of gnarls and imperfections, occasioned by the 
secret enemy within, winding his crooked way 
through the flesh, and producing premature falling 
from the tree and speedy decay. 

Whenever we are wrathful or regardless of con- 
sequences in the doing of what we call good works, 
we may be sure that the worm of self-love is at 
work in our hearts, and that what we are calling 
philanthropy, or charity, or any other good name, 
is only a form of the love of doing our own will. 
If we have an impetuous temper, which we ac- 
knowledge should not be indulged indiscriminately, 
we find perhaps great relief, and even a kind of 
self-satisfaction, in indulging it in what we consider 
a discriminating way, upon those who differ from 
us in politics, in religion, or in matters of social 
reform. We perhaps condemn our neighbor with 
the utmost virulence on such grounds, calling 
our intemperate wrath righteous indignation, or 
holy hatred ; and do not seem to think we thereby 



248 INSECTS AND WORMS. 

tarnish the purity of our philanthropy, our 
patriotism, or our piety. The Almighty makes 
even ' ' the wrath of man to praise Him ; " over- 
ruling and restraining it till He can bend its effects 
to His own wise and loving purposes ; but this 
does not make our indulgence of it the less per- 
nicious to our own souls. Offences must come, 
but this does not diminish the woe to those by 
whom they come. Philanthropy that measures the 
depth of its love for its favorites by the violence of 
its hatred towards the rest of society, has no better 
foundation than the love of its own self-will ; and 
religion that cannot believe there is any way of 
salvation but the one in which itself walks, is based 
upon a self-asserting spiritual pride. The wind- 
fall works that are born of fanatical zeal, are dis- 
credited in the great harvest of the ages, while the 
ripened results that come from the calm self-control 
of true piety and charity go on blessing the world 
in ever-widening results from century to century. 
We all know that the poor have claims upon us ; 
but to aid the poor in such a way as will really 
benefit them, requires time, and care, and thought. 
Our indolence makes us unwilling to give these, 
and tells us that it is better to aid nine worthless 
objects than to let one worthy object go empty 



INSECTS AND WORMS. 249 

away ; and we are thus often led to scatter our 
means indiscriminately, without reflecting that each 
unworthily bestowed alms takes from us just so 
much power of worthy benefaction ; and that while 
we pay premiums to vice, we cannot, by just so 
much, do justice to virtue. This windfall charity 
is better for us than to shut our hearts against the 
calls of suffering, whether seeming or real ; but we 
should not close our eyes to the fact that the worm of 
indolence is preventing the ripening of a far better 
fruit. A discriminating charity strengthens the 
hands of the poor to help themselves, while the 
indiscriminate giving of alms only makes the 
poor poorer, by teaching them to look to others for 
that which their own industry should provide. 

In domestic life we are liable to fall into similar 
errors, through an impatient zeal that others 
should do what seems right in our eyes, or through 
an indolence that leads us to indulge the vices 
and foibles of those under our care or influence, 
rather than to take the trouble to curb them in their 
beginnings. A patience that is wise and yet 
earnest, that hastens not and yet rests not, ripens 
the domestic virtues into fulness of beauty, making 
home the type of heaven ; but how seldom do we 



250 INSECTS AND WORMS. 

see this ; how hard is it for us to do our part in 
forming such a home. 

We are at the best short-sighted and fallible 
creatures, liable to err at every step ; and know- 
ing this, we should walk humbly with our fellows, 
not presuming to judge them as He who reads the 
heart alone can. Let us keep our judgments for 
our own works, and strive not to imagine them 
fair and beautiful while they are limited by our in- 
dolence, or sullied and alloyed by selfishness and 
pride. Let us remember that there is an eternal 
world, in which the worm dieth not ; and let us 
hasten to cast it from us, and trample it under our 
feet, while we abide in the world of things that can 
be made to pass away. 




THE POWER 

AND 

USE OF CIRCUMSTANCE. 



^^\9 / 2/^@\S s e^»^ 



" Every form changes to its own quality whacever flows into 

it " — S WEDENBORG. 

" Where the bee sucks honey the spider sucks poison." 

Proverb. 



QA3> 




XX. 



THE POWER AND USE OF CIRCUMSTANCE . 



fel^HE garden teaches us innumerable lessons 
i^JSgf in its many forms of use and of beauty, 
and varied as these forms are, even so varied are 
the sermons they preach to those who willingly 
and reverently seek for instruction. There is, 
however, one great lesson which, though taught 
by the whole creation, is expressed more emphati- 
cally and more clearly in the garden than else- 
where, because there, more than anywhere else, 
a greater variety of forms is brought under the 
influence of similar circumstances. This lesson is, 
that circumstance has no power to create anything, 
nor even any part of anything ; and that its power 
of modifying things after they are created, is lim- 
ited by the innate peculiarities of those things. 

Cultivation develops latent powers and charac- 
teristics in all things, but it gives them no new 
(253) 



254 THE POWER AND USE 

properties or parts. By enriching the juices of the 
plant it changes a worthless into a delicious fruit ; 
turns leaf-buds into flower-buds, thereby increas- 
ing the quantity of fruit; and it may go still 
farther, by developing stamens and pistils into 
petals, till it destroys the fruit-producing power in 
the blossom. All this is but development, not 
creation. The plant-stems are full of latent leaf- 
germs, which appropriate nourishment develops 
into a branch, a leaf, or a blossom, which is but a 
cluster of leaves ; for science teaches us that petal, 
pistil, and stamen, each result from the same 
kind of germ that produces a leaf, and that the dif- 
ference in form and hue is the result of circum- 
stance and not of innate peculiarity. 

When we see how much may be done by cul- 
ture in improving plants, we are liable to exagger- 
ate our ideas of its power, and to feel as if it were 
almost, if net quite, creative. Still we cannot, 
through its means, change the absolute character- 
istics of anything. No amount of culture over- 
comes the poisonous qualities of a plant, and no 
neglect can make an innocent plant poisonous. 
Unless the germ of goodness was originally 
formed in the plant, no labor of ours can develop 
anything good ; and if its original germ was evil, 



OF CIRCUMSTANCE. 255 

we labor in vain to subdue it except by total 
destruction. 

The human mind is as a garden, and its various 
traits are as plants in a garden. We are born 
with good traits and evil ones, and for these 
inborn traits we are neither to be praised nor 
blamed. We are no more responsible for them 
than for the color of our hair or eyes. They come 
to us by no will of our own, just as an inheritance 
of property may come to us by legal right. Our 
responsibility lies in the use that we make of our 
inheritance, in the culture that we give to our 
traits. Every one of these traits is as full of 
thought-germs as a plant is of leaf-germs, and the 
culture they receive decides whether they are to 
remain latent, or be developed into leaf, flower, 
fruit, or branch. 

In our judgments of others we are apt to think 
too little of the power of circumstance in the for- 
mation of character ; but in our judgments of our- 
selves we are almost sure to err on the opposite 
side. We can see quite plainly how our neighbor 
falls, but we cannot measure the influence that 
nature, education, or circumstance has had to 
strengthen his evil propensities, or to weaken his 
power of self-control. With ourselves it is 



256 THE POWER AND USE 

just the reverse. If we do wrong, we know 
how hard it would have been to resist temptation ; 
and we fly at once to circumstance, inborn propen- 
sity, education, — anything that we can call to our 
aid, — as a scape-goat, to carry the responsibility 
for our sins away from us. Then we do not 
know how many times our neighbor may have 
resisted temptation where he has once fallen ; but 
for ourselves we are ready to say, only this once 
have I sinned, as though previous resistance to 
temptation made present failure a venial thing. 

The garden, though corresponding truly with 
the mind of man, is, like all other things and 
creatures that surround us in this world, separated 
distinctly from man by being a fixed image, hav- 
ing no voluntary principle by which it is able to 
make itself better or worse. The plant is incapa- 
ble of love or hate, and so cannot desire goodness 
nor shun evil. The animal can only love its 
own propensities, and hate all that is other than 
itself, and is as powerless to change its own nature 
as to alter the color of its skin. 

All living things else love and seek only that 
which feeds their own natural propensities. Man 
alone can distinguish between good and evil, aside 
from his own propensities. He alone can see 



OF CIRCUMSTANCE. 257 

good and evil apart from himself; and, coming as 
it were out from himself, can look at his own 
characteristics as if he were another person, and 
perceive what in himself is evil and should be sup- 
pressed, and what is good and should be en- 
couraged. 

The natural traits of every human mind make 
up its identity, and we can neither destroy an 
original one nor create a new one. All that lies 
in our power is to suppress the evil and to encour- 
age the good. 

We sometimes see a little child who is sur- 
rounded by good influences at home seem pure as 
an angel, and we perhaps suppose that he has no 
evil propensities. The same child goes to school, 
and soon seems like another creature, — wild, sel- 
fish, and obstinate. Some will say he has been 
taught all this by evil companions ; but the truth 
is, that they have only brought out the latent 
qualities of the child's mind. One may as well 
guess at what lies in the bottom of an unfathomed 
pool, as to suppose one knows the heart of a child 
that has lived only in a refined and virtuous seclu- 
sion. 

So it is with all of us, so long as we live. We 
may fancy ourselves pious and kind, if we live 

17 



258 THE POWER AND USE 

very much by ourselves ; but if we go out into the 
world we are surprised to find how worldly and 
selfish we are ; how irritable, and vain, and en- 
vious, and ambitious ; how we love to criticise 
others, and how offended we are at being criticised 
in turn. The monk in his cloistered retirement, 
the hermit in his solitary cell, may spend a life in 
rigid and conscientious self-examination, and yet 
never learn what manner of spirit they are of. 

The world, through its temptations, brings out 
our latent qualities, and shows us what we are. 
Retirement lulls many of our qualities asleep, and 
so hides us from ourselves. The world may take 
such entire possession of us that we do not stop 
to see what are the qualities it is developing in our 
being; but he who truly desires to know what 
lies within his heart, can hear what it tells him 
even amid all the confusing voices with which the 
world strives to drown its words. 

In training a child, much time and strength are 
often wasted in the attempt to change his identity. 
Instead of trying to find out what his traits are, 
and then cultivating, modifying,, or suppressing 
them, according as they are good or evil, the 
parent often tries to create traits, and to fashion 
the child over, after some model in his own mind. 



OF CIRCUMSTANCE. 259 

So in training one's self the same mistake is often 
made. A model is set up in the mind to imitate, 
instead of search being made within to see what 
there is there already to be cultivated or rooted 
out. 

This striving to change the mind's identity is as 
if a gardener should strive to change not the qual- 
ity of a fruit, but the fruit itself; to make an 
apple-tree bear peaches, or a blackberry bush bear 
raspberries. True, grafting and budding accom- 
plish something of this sort, but only between 
plants of similar characteristics ; and the resulting 
tree or branch is tender and short-lived in compar- 
ison with a well-cultivated natural growth. 

If our garden is a level surface, it is idle for us 
to attempt the imitation of the picturesque beauty 
of a neighbor's, which is gracefully undulating. 
If our garden is high and dry, we had better not 
plant water-lilies in it. We can, to be sure, scoop 
out valleys and heap up hills, and make a tank 
where the lilies will grow; but the same labor 
spent in bringing out the natural capacities of the 
soil would bring about a far more satisfactory 
result. There is a kind of landscape gardening, 
and an abundance of plants, adapted to every 
locality ; and the true grace of nature is brought 



260 THE POWEE AND USE 

out with a more pleasing effect where her original 
capacities are consulted than where they are set 
aside. 

So in the human mind ; wise education is the 
drawing out of the good which lies latent, not 
the putting in of something foreign. Training 
is the culture and modification of traits inborn, not 
the striving to introduce new ones. 

We may bring the plants of every zone to set 
out in our garden, but those only of particular 
latitudes can live and flourish there. We may 
crowd our memories with the literature of all 
times and nations, but only that which finds an 
answering sympathy in our minds will make its 
home with us. Once or twice in a century a mind 
exists which seems to possess capacities so various 
that it is capable of every kind of culture, as a 
mountain in the torrid zone may furnish climate 
and soil adapted to the wants of every plant the 
earth produces. These are, however, so rare, 
and so surprising when they appear, that they 
prove themselves exceptions, and therefore are not 
to be taken as standards or models. 

Circumstance is seldom in our power, but the 
freedom of our will gives us the ability to make a 
good use even of the worst. Circumstance is our 



OF CIRCUMSTANCE. 261 

great educator; the great power that leads out 
the faculties of the mind by nurturing its good 
and tempting its evil propensities. It does not 
develop our characters so much by shaping as by 
simply expanding what it finds within us. The 
shaping of our faculties is, for the most part, 
accomplished by our own choice and will, after cir- 
cumstance has expanded them. The beneficent nu- 
triment contained in the wheat is fed by the same 
juices of the earth that give their virulence to the 
night-shade and the ivy. The same social circle 
nurtures charity, purity, and piety in one man, and 
envy, malignity, and infidelity in another. The 
plant is a unit without freedom. Man is a little 
world with freedom. He is not, like the ivy, all 
poison, or, like the wheat, all goodness. He is a 
garden, stocked with many plants, good and evil, 
and he can choose between them, which to culti- 
vate and which to weed out, unless the evil 
preponderates so as to make him morally an idiot, 
in which case his responsibility ceases. 

We cannot too early in life come to a fixed con- 
viction that circumstance is just such an educator 
as we choose to make of it. If we are indolent 
and careless, it will rule us with the rod of a des- 
pot, and bow us down to the very dust of the 



262 THE POWEft AND USE 

earth, till we crawl there the slaves of its power. 
If we are earnest of purpose, thoughtful to scan, 
and industrious to use the opportunities it offers 
us, we may walk erect in the full stature of the 
children of the heavenly kingdom, upon the way 
that leads to eternal life. 

We are often surprised at the effect change of 
circumstance produces upon our neighbors, bring- 
ing out traits we had not before discovered, or 
stimulating traits we had before thought unimpor- 
tant, till they overshadow the whole character. 
Sometimes our friends disturb us by sinking below 
the estimate we had formed of them; and some- 
times they delight us by rising above what we had 
anticipated of them, under the pressure of adver- 
sity or the stimulus of prosperity. Looking into 
our own hearts we find similar causes of surprise, 
both joyful and sorrowful ; for probably no person 
was ever placed in new circumstances without 
finding himself thereby affected in some way that 
he would never have anticipated. Yet we are all 
prone to think we know how we should feel if 
placed where others stand, and are ready to ex- 
claim : "If I were rich as this man, how much 
more generous I would be, and how much less 
ostentatious;" or, "If I were celebrated as that 



OF CIRCUMSTANCE. 263 

man, how much more magnanimous I would be 
towards my rivals, and how much more kind to 
aspirants who sought my aid." Imperfectly as we 
may use our own limited possessions, we can with 
the utmost ease decide how wisely we should act 
if more largely endowed, or how much better use 
we could make of a talent very much smaller than 
that with which we have been intrusted. We can 
measure the true relations of anybody's position 
easier than our own. Self-love perpetually finds 
some peculiarity in our own standpoint that pre- 
vents us from applying the same rules to ourselves 
that we use for others. Temptation is very easy 
to resist while we only imagine what its power 
may be ; and the practice of every virtue almost 
a matter of course as its beauty is revealed before 
the mind's eye. Yet which of us has a mental 
garden wherein an unexpected stirring of the soil 
does not bring the seeds of evil plants near enough 
the surface to cause them to germinate, and soon 
to come to a mischievous growth, unless we are 
ever on the alert to tear them up so soon as they 
appear. Nothing but the most prayerful watch- 
fulness can save us from falling, if not just as our 
neighbors do, in ways just as evil. Every soil has 
scattered through it the seeds of the most divers 



264 THE POWER AND USE 

plants, and so fast as they are brought near the 
surface by culture or accident, they are ever ready 
to spring into life. Just so in our mental gardens, 
we can never know what germs of good or evil 
lie hid beneath the surface, till the varied discip- 
line of life develops them. 

During the ages that have rolled by since the 
creation of the earth, the soil has been gradually 
accumulating, and burying within itself every 
variety of vegetable seed. Wherever the under 
soil is brought to the surface by agriculture it is 
soon sprouting with vegetation. Even the soil 
that is thrown out from the depths of mines and 
of Artesian wells is often found to be full of these 
germs of vegetable life. In like manner the hu- 
man mind is compacted from the minds of all its 
ancestors. We inherit the traits of hundreds of 
generations ; and not only during this life, but 
during the life of eternity, these traits will be 
brought to light, unfolding successively as circum- 
stances favor their development. 

In unmingled prosperity the mind may lie like 
a natural meadow, where rich turf is overshadowed 
by stately trees, and nothing unseemly interrupts 
the Arcadian picture. The Divine Providence, 
through the discipline of toil, and the common 



OF CIRCUMSTANCE.' 265 

vicissitudes to which life is subject, breaks up this 
natural turf as with a ploughshare, and goodly- 
seed is planted ; but there springs up with it the 
seed hidden underneath the turf, and as much care 
and toil is required to destroy the weeds as to cul- 
tivate the useful plants. 

Sometimes events come to us like earthquakes, 
rending the soil, subverting its whole form, and 
bringing to the light of day things so deeply hid- 
den, that their existence had never before been 
suspected. Latent wealth of capacity may appear 
like masses of virgin gold, or less noble metal 
that with greater effort may be wrought, like iron, 
to the most useful purposes. And, on the con- 
trary, such a convulsion may cover the before fair 
face of nature with barren sand. 

It is for us to bear in mind that it is in our 
own power to lay up treasures of truth and wis- 
dom that will be ready to do us good service when 
the earthquakes come. The mind that has only 
poverty within its depths is such by its own indo- 
lence and indifference. There is abundant treas- 
ure offered us by the Heavenly Father, if we will 
but gather it in. No mind, however finely en- 
dowed, has wealth sufficient unto itself; and must 



266 THE POWER AND USE 

sooner or later become bankrupt, if it strive to 
live upon its own riches, without drawing new 
supplies from the infinite treasury. The Divine 
Goodness and Truth are ever coming down to us 
through the Scriptures, through the workings 
of Providence in nature and in history, and 
through the personal experience of every indivi- 
dual mind. Blessed are the eyes that see and the 
ears that hear. We must look and listen if we 
would receive of the Divine beneficence ; for full to 
overflowing as it is, our perceptions may be so 
obscured as to be inaccessible to its influx. As 
the ivy sucks poison from every variety of soil, so 
the perverted mind finds food to nourish and in- 
flame its evil passions in every fountain of truth 
that the Heavenly Father causes to flow for our 
benefit. That which is a limpid well-spring of 
sweet and refreshing water to him who seeks 
heavenly support, is insipidity or bitterness to him 
who seeks only the excitement that comes from 
selfish indulgence or worldly applause. The 
Heavenly Physician stands ever ready to heal us 
of the infirmities that incapacitate us for the enjoy- 
ment of spiritual life ; but whatever we receive 
from Him must be in accordance with our faith in 



OF CIRCUMSTANCE. 267 

His power and our love for His person. Those 
who approach Him only as a good master, and 
relying in the riches of their own good works, will 
be disappointed in His replies now as when He was 
on earth ; but those who worship Him as their 
Lord and God, now as then, will find their infir- 
mities healed and their sins forgiven. 

The test of this healing and this forgiveness 
must be found in the lives we lead, and in the 
relations we hold to those who are round about us. 
All that we receive with the heartfelt acknowledg- 
ment that it is a heavenly gift, we shall be willing 
to share with others. The more clearly we per- 
ceive that the Lord is our Father, the more ready 
we shall be to acknowledge the common brother- 
hood of humanity, and so to give with the same 
freedom that we receive. Then we shall compre- 
hend how small a part of the virtue of charity lies 
in almsgiving ; and though we may be as poor in 
worldly wealth as the disciples, we shall, like 
them, hear the command addressed to us, " Freely 
ye have received; freely give." We shall learn 
that we may compel a goodly harvest out of 
whatever soil may have been intrusted to our 
cultivation; and we shall be convinced that if 



268 THE POWER AND USE OF CIRCUMSTANCE. 

the gardens of our own hearts are warmed with 
Heavenly Love, and watered with Heavenly Truth, 
they will tolerate within then* bounds only such 
products as spring from, and at the same time 
nourish, love to God and to the neighbor. 




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